Professors Sergei Pond and Ananias Escalante of the College of Science and Technology will lead a hub of the BRC-Analytics—a newly established Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC) for Infectious Diseases funded by the National Institutes of Health.

BRC-Analytics is charged with addressing one of the most pressing challenges in biomedical research today: the complexity and inaccessibility of diverse data sets across the biomedical domains. BRC-Analytics will connect infectious disease researchers to large-scale genomic data, software tools, and analytical workflows. The platform will be a novel type of resource that provides not only data, but also tools and infrastructure to use the data effectively and efficiently. It will also stand ready to support emerging needs, outbreaks, and public health emergencies using cutting-edge bioinformatics technologies.

“Receiving this award solidifies Temple University as a major bioinformatics hub, further establishing its reputation of excellence in computational genomics and data science,” said Sudhir Kumar, director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine.

BRC-Analytics brings together teams at Temple, Pennsylvania State University, Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz, and Texas Advanced Computing Center. The teams will share $3.25M of funding, with $750,000 per year for the Temple team.

“Our project will enhance the efficiency of infectious disease research and foster new standards of innovation in data accessibility and analysis,” according to Pond, the Temple lead on the project.

Launched in 2024 and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), BRCs are being established in recognition of the critical roles played by large-scale data and analytical tools in human infectious disease research. NIAID funded three BRCs this year.