# BioMedical Big Data Core

> **NIH NIH P20** · BROWN UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $377,375

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
The long term goal of the COBRE for Computational Biology of Human Disease (CBHD) is to enhance the
integration of basic biological and computational approaches to the study of human disease at Brown, its affiliated
hospitals and across Rhode Island. Realizing this goal requires expertise that can support researchers across
the spectrum from molecular biologists and clinical researchers using high throughput sequencing, to data
scientists mining large publicly available human genomic datasets. In the initial Phase 1 support for this COBRE,
we established the CBHD community and built the Computational Biology Core (CBC) facility to support junior
faculty Project Leaders (PLs) that spanned this range of research. This support has led to seven NIH R01/R35
awards plus additional grants for our Project Leaders and Pilot awardees totaling more than $17.9M. In this
Phase 2 renewal proposal we will strengthen and broaden the support for the CBC to enable a new cohort of
CBHD COBRE PLs, plus other researchers in the Brown biomedical community, to advance their research into
the computational biology of human disease. Computational and bioinformatic analyses have become a common
language in contemporary biomedical research and are central tools required for researchers to realize the
advances in genome enabled science. Our CBHD COBRE seeks to translate these tools into shared, accessible
resources that will strengthen the competitiveness, and sense of community for all biomedical researchers in
Rhode Island. The proximate goal of this COBRE in Phase 2 will be providing support for junior faculty PLs and
Pilot awardees in the analysis and interpretation of massive sequencing datasets generated in their own labs or
obtained from publicly available datbases. This will provide support for investigators who lack resources to build
the necessary skill sets within their research groups, and accelerate their progress towards research funding
independence. The central approach of the CBC will be to serve as a hub of collaborative service through the
development of reproducible software pipelines and providing workshops for training of researchers to acquire
bioinformatics fluency. This will enhance scientific interactions between diverse projects and broaden the sense
of the community across the CBHD COBRE. The long-term goal of the CBC is to provide a sustainable resource
to support the analytical challenges in ‘omics-scale human disease research across Brown University, our
affiliated hospitals, and other researchers in Rhode Island. This will be achieved through three Specific Aims: 1.
Strengthen computational and bioinformatics support for biomedical researchers; 2. Develop reproducible
pipelines and interfaces to global data analysis and data sharing platforms; 3. Extend training and workshops to
enhance computational skills of the broader community. This will bring the language of computational biology to
a broader audience and increase the sk...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10271622
- **Project number:** 2P20GM109035-06
- **Recipient organization:** BROWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Zhijin Jean Wu
- **Activity code:** P20 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $377,375
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2016-06-01 → 2026-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10271622

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10271622, BioMedical Big Data Core (2P20GM109035-06). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10271622. Licensed CC0.

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