Bringing Advanced Computational Techniques to Energy Research (BACTER)
This report briefly summarizes the achievements of the BACTER training program in computational biology, sponsored by the US Department of Energy’s SciDAC and Genomics:GTL programs. We thank them for their support and generosity over the course of this interdisciplinary training initiative. We began in 2004 with a small group of dedicated graduate students and postdocs. Our goal was to enhance training of quantitative scientists in biological areas of relevance to the DOE mission, as well as to integrate biological scientists and cross-train them in areas of quantitative research. Our early students have now matriculated and gone on to postdoctoral positions at Yale, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and Imperial College, while others have taken positions in local biotech firms here in Madison based on their positive experiences with the research climate here. Two former postdocs went into faculty jobs (University of California Merced and Northern Illinois University) while others went on for additional postdoctoral training (Purdue, Duke) and still others went on into industry. Over the course of time, we have experimented with new training activities, including embedded science writers and scientific programmers. Our final training experiment was to train two computational and experimental students/postdocs to work in unison on new projects, to see whether this would accelerate transfer of knowledge and scientific discovery. As evidenced by the high-quality publications and career trajectories of our trainees, and the rapid progress of cross-training projects initiated during our final year, our efforts were very successful in understanding how to better advance the role of quantitative science in bioenergy research and to train the next generation of researchers to help make biofuels a viable energy source for to help meet the needs of the US population.