Program Announcement: GoLife solicitation goes live!

A new DEB Program Solicitation titled, Genealogy of Life (GoLife), has been posted http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5129 with a deadline for proposals of March 26, 2014.

GoLife has two primary research objectives, resolving life’s phylogenetic history and integrating the genealogy of life with additional organismal biodiversity datasets. This solicitation builds upon the former Assembling the Tree of Life program, with new emphases on a complete and universal genealogy of all life’s lineages, broad training in phylogenetic comparative biology, and community development of open and expandable frameworks for data sharing.

 The program synopsis is as follows.

All of comparative biology depends on knowledge of the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of living and extinct organisms. In addition, understanding biodiversity and how it changes over time is only possible when Earth’s diversity is organized into a phylogenetic framework. The goals of the Genealogy of Life (GoLife) program are to resolve the phylogenetic history of life and to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal data.

The ultimate vision of this program is an open access, universal Genealogy of Life that will provide the comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and other fields. A further strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological and temporal data will produce a grand synthesis of biodiversity and evolutionary sciences. The resulting knowledge infrastructure will enable synthetic research on biological dynamics throughout the history of life on Earth, within current ecosystems, and for predictive modeling of the future evolution of life.

Projects submitted to this program should emphasize increased efficiency in contributing to a complete Genealogy of Life and integration of various types of organismal data with phylogenies.

This program also seeks to broadly train next generation, integrative phylogenetic biologists, creating the human resource infrastructure and workforce needed to tackle emerging research questions in comparative biology. Projects should train students for diverse careers by exposing them to the multidisciplinary areas of research within the proposal.

2 thoughts on “Program Announcement: GoLife solicitation goes live!

  1. Pingback: Program Announcement: GoLife solicitation goes ...

  2. Pingback: Meet DEB: David Mindell, SBS Program Officer | DEBrief

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