Fangping Mu awarded Pitt Seed Grant

Assistant research professor and CRC consultant Fangping Mu has been awarded funding as one of  20 projects in the 2021 Pitt Seed Grant program, which provides startup funding to transformative projects that support the goals of Pitt’s strategic plan. His award is for a university-wide Computational Genomics Training Program to address the the lack of bioinformatics expertise to take advantage of technologies such as next generation sequencing.

"Investment in high performance computing clusters, such as the High Throughput Computing cluster managed by Center for Research Computing, have made computational resources increasingly accessible to interpret the results of genomic experiments," says Mu. "However, many research groups face a pressing challenge of a lack of readily accessible bioinformatics expertise."

The project aims to design and teach approximately 40 three-hour hands-on computational genomics workshops during the coming two years, and to design and manage a web forum platform to allow Pitt researchers to exchange questions and experience in bioinformatics-related research.

Mu's collaborators in the project include:
Riyue Bao, School of Medicine 
Uma Chandran, Biomedical Informatics
Robert Lafyatis, School of Medicine
Shuchang Liu, Pathology
Amanda Poholek, Pediatrics
Dhivyaa Rajasundaram, Pediatrics