National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)

SYNOPSIS

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is an NSF-funded center in Durham, North Carolina. The center represents a collaborative effort by three Universities in North Carolina's Research Triangle: Duke, NC State, and UNC-Chapel Hill.

The central goal of NESCent is to foster a greater conceptual synthesis in biological evolution by bringing together researchers and educators, extant data and information technology resources. To achieve this primary goal the Center will develop new tools and cross-disciplinary standards for management of biological information and meta-information, support data analysis capabilities with broad utility, and host and curate databases.

The Center will support postdoctoral fellows, sabbatical faculty, and computer scientists on site. Researchers will have primary projects of their own design, but as a whole the group will have a great deal of independence to take advantage of new opportunities for synthesis and collaboration as they arise. In addition, NESCent will coordinate and sponsor a number of working groups tasked with making progress on significant issues in evolutionary biology where opportunities for synthesis have been identified. The Center will also support education and outreach activities to enhance public understanding of the science of biological evolution and foster interactions between evolutionary biologists and members of the broader community.

Visit the NESCent home page for additional details [http://www.nescent.org/index.html].

NSF Contact Information

• Dr. Saran Twombly, Program Director, Ecological Biology, 703-292-8133, stwombly@nsf.gov.