Dr. Levi Waldron, Investigator at the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) at the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH), has been awarded two significant grants from private foundations to advance research in Parkinson’s disease and bioinformatics.
The first grant, a two-year grant of $706,761.26 from The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s “Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s” (ASAP) initiative, will fund the creation of a Microbiome Analytic Core (MAC) to support cutting-edge research on the role of the gut microbiome in Parkinson’s disease.
“This grant will align major parallel efforts to understand the role of the gut microbiome in Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Waldron. “By creating a centralized resource for microbiome data analysis, we’ll be able both to support the groups collecting data, and to integrate these data to accelerate research and potentially uncover new pathways for diagnosis and treatment.”
This grant is a collaboration with the University of Trento, Italy, and the worldwide ASAP network.
The second two-year grant of $400,000 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) Program, will support the expansion of Bioconductor’s infrastructure to enable Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-accelerated analysis of high-throughput biomedical data.
“Bioconductor has been a cornerstone of bioinformatics for over two decades,” says Dr. Waldron. “This funding will help us future-proof our infrastructure and make GPU acceleration more accessible to researchers in fields ranging from cancer genomics to spatial transcriptomics.
This grant is a collaboration with the University of Padova, Italy.
These two grants are expected to significantly enhance the capabilities of researchers worldwide in interpreting large-scale biomedical data, and to improve our knowledge of the role of the gut microbiome in Parkinson’s disease.
For more information about Bioconductor, visit https://www.bioconductor.org/
For more information about the Michael J. Fox ASAP initiative, see https://www.michaeljfox.org/asap
For more information about the CZI EOSS Initiative, see https://chanzuckerberg.com/eoss/proposals/?cycle=6