Under the leadership of team co-principal investigator Greg Von Kuster, Penn State Galaxy consultant, working out of the University’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the team will develop a Galaxy environment to enable CDC Laboratory Response Network scientists to conduct near real-time bioinformatic analyses and produce actionable information.
Von Kuster, who has been working in computational research for 34 years and is one of the initial developers of the Galaxy project, is an expert in data-intensive computational research using Galaxy. Galaxy is an open-source, web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical research, enabling non-bioinformaticians to conduct complex bioinformatics analyses.
“Penn State scientists began developing Galaxy in 2005, and the Galaxy team has expanded to a worldwide community with continuous ongoing enhancements,” he said. “Galaxy has been adopted and utilized around the world by thousands of scientists, across many areas of research. It will significantly enhance the research being conducted by the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network.”
The Galaxy platform will enable integration of the established CDC bioinformatics workflows with the pathogen-prediction workflows that will be developed in this project.
Also on the Penn State research team are Taejung Chung and Xiaoyuan Wei, doctoral degree student and a postdoctoral scholar, respectively, in the Department of Food Science; and Nate Coraor, system administrator and programmer on the Galaxy team, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
