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Penn State and U.S. National Science Foundation representatives cut a ribbon celebrating the official launch of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences (NCEMS) with the Penn State Nittany Lion mascot. The NCEMS launch took place on Monday, Nov. 18, and provided information about open calls for working groups, fellowships and internships, as well as a growth trajectory over the next five years. Credit: Keith Hickey/Huck Institutes.

NCEMS announces 10 working groups seeking to answer molecular and cellular bioscience questions

EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this story was originally published on Penn State News.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences (NCEMS) at Penn State recently announced the 10 initial working groups that the center will be supporting, according to Justin Petucci, NCEMS associate director and Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) artificial intelligence and machine learning team lead.

The working groups span 43 institutions across 18 states — including Washington, D.C. — and six countries. The groups are supported with NCEMS resources for up to two years, and after that, the groups will pursue external funding and leverage their research findings into long-term research opportunities.

This cohort of 87 researchers will have access to staff scientist time and support, computational resources, data storage, research project management, publication and travel costs. The cohort is comprised of faculty principal investigators, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students.

In the two years, the working groups will conduct research in accordance with open science principles, producing peer-reviewed articles, public datasets, reproducible workflows and other forms of openly shared knowledge to advance molecular sciences.

“I’m most excited by the new connections across disciplines that NCEMS has catalyzed. Most working groups bring together researchers from different fields who haven’t collaborated before, which highlights how NCEMS is lowering barriers to enable boundary-crossing synthesis research,” said Daniel Nissley, NCEMS chief science officer and ICDS RISE bioinformatician and computational biologist.

The goals of the center include increasing broad data use and re-use, as well as “integrating diverse datasets and theories to gain deeper insights about emergent properties that could lead to fundamental discoveries such as identifying new protein interactions that influence cellular function, support environmental adaptation and enable advances in areas like bioengineering, agriculture and synthetic biology,” Petucci said.

The working groups were selected from an open request for proposals focused on fundamental research questions in the molecular and cellular biosciences to drive multidisciplinary collaboration and produce publicly available derivative data products, according to the Penn State News release. Each group will have their first meeting at Penn State and then continue their work at their home institutions with regular virtual meetings.

“We expect the diverse perspectives of the researchers will lead to transformative discoveries. It’s exciting research that we are bringing together,” said Ed O’Brien, NCEMS director, ICDS co-hire and professor of chemistry in the Eberly College of Science.

NCEMS is supported by the NSF, as well as ICDS and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, both at Penn State.

To find a full list of the working groups’ projects, visit the NCEMS website.

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