Dr. Sylvia Spengler

Sylvia Spengler is program director in Division of Information and Intelligent System (IIS) within the CISE Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She also served as program officer for the Biological Databases and Informatics in BIO/DBI. Prior to joining NSF, she was a Director of Department of Energy (DOE) Human Genome Program Field Operations. She served as Co-Director of the Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Her many honors include Senior Fellow of the American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellow. As a member of DOE ELSI panels, she has been involved in evaluating the ethical, legal and social implications of human genome research. Dr. Spengler's many publications include co-authorship of the DOE's Primer of Molecular Biology.

As part of her work with the Human Genome Project Dr. Spengler has been involved in many types of public outreach including lectures given to college students, judges, and appearances on public television.

Her current NSF programs include

Information and Intelligent Systems: Advancing Human-Centered Computing, Information Integration and Informatics, and Robust Intelligence

CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH)

Domestic Nuclear Detection Office/National Science Foundation Academic Research Initiative (ARI)

Explosives and Related Threats: Frontiers in Prediction and Detection (EXP)

Dr. Aidong Zhang is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at State University of New York at Buffalo. She is currently on leave and is program director at NSF/CISE/IIS. Her research interests include data mining, bioinformatics, multimedia and database systems, and content-based image retrieval. She is an author of over 280 research publications in these areas. She has chaired or served on over 100 program committees of international conferences and workshops, and currently serves several journal editorial boards. She has published two books “Protein Interaction Networks: Computational Analysis” (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and “Advanced Analysis of Gene Expression Microarray Data” (World Scientific Publishing Co., Inc. 2006). Dr. Zhang is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor's Research Recognition award. Dr. Zhang is an IEEE Fellow.

NIH Funding Opportunities – Computational Sciences within NIGMS.

Dr. Veerasamy will give an overview about the existing funding opportunities in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology area, including the training.

Veerasamy "Ravi" Ravichandran, Ph.D., is a program director in the Division of Biomedical Technology, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology. He manages research, resource and training grants in the areas of biomedical technology, bioinformatics and computational biology. Ravichandran is also involved in facilitating and coordinating trans-NIH activities related to big data. Earlier in his career, he was a staff scientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and an associate research scientist at Yale University School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania. Ravichandran conducted postdoctoral research as an IRTA fellow in the NCI Laboratory of Pathology and Experimental Immunology Branch. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, master’s degrees in biochemistry and philosophy/clinical biochemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Madras in India. Ravichandran also earned a master’s degree in computer science and bioinformatics from John Hopkins University and a certificate degree in database development from George Washington University.