The University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus One of Nine Institutions to Create a National Research Resource Discovery (NRRD) Network
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant of $15 million from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to a nine-member consortium from across the country to create a National Research Resource Discovery (NRRD) network (http://www.nih.gov/news/health/nov2009/ncrr-02.htm ). The goal of this grant is to enable biomedical scientists from anywhere in the US to search resource inventories at all nine participating sites and request access to resources that will assist in their work. The network will be built such that resource inventories from additional sites can be added over time.
"National networking provides opportunities for scientists to collaborate in new, exciting ways to improve abilities to uncover underlying pathways and mechanisms of biology and to develop new diagnostics, treatments and prevention strategies," said NCRR Director Barbara Alving, M.D. "The infrastructure created and implemented through these awards has the potential to greatly facilitate the pace of biomedical research nationwide." The nine institutions of diverse size, population, and environment from across the country that will constitute this network are Dartmouth College (NH), Harvard Medical School (MA), Jackson State University (MS), Morehouse School of Medicine (GA), Montana State University (MT), Oregon Health & Science University (OR), University of Alaska at Fairbanks (AK), University of Hawaii at Manoa (HI), and the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus (PR). As a group, these institutions will build an infrastructure consisting of a federated, networked system of resource inventories located at each institution that can be searched using a dedicated web-based portal or Internet search engines. The consortium will be known as eagle-i.
Project leaders at the University of Puerto Rico include Dr. Emma Fernández-Repollet, RCMI Program Director; Dr. José G. Conde, RCMI Program Associate Director, and Dr. Humberto Ortíz, Acting Director of the High Performance Computing facility. The group will work closely with university administration do develop a plan to maintain and sustain the resource discovery and sharing infrastructure. Full project descriptions provided by each lead institution, as well as a list of project partner institutions, are available at www.ncrr.nih.gov/u24.
