The University of Washington is receiving a $31.2 million gift from the Washington Research Foundation to support four interdisciplinary initiatives that seek to advance global innovation in clean energy, protein design, big data science and neuroengineering.
The largest award, $9.3 million, is to the University of Washington eScience Institute, committed to UW’s leadership in data science – both in advancing the methodologies, and in putting these advances to work in a broad range of fields.
The eScience Institute is a campus-wide effort. The WRF proposal team included Cecilia Aragon (Human Centered Design & Engineering), Ginger Armbrust (Oceanography), Magda Balazinska (CSE), Andrew Connolly (Astronomy), Tom Daniel (Biology), Emily Fox (Statistics), Carlos Guestrin (CSE), Jeff Heer (CSE), Bill Howe (CSE and Associate Director of the eScience Institute), Ed Lazowska (CSE and Director of the eScience Institute), Randy LeVeque (Applied Mathematics), Tyler McCormick (Sociology and Statistics), and Bill Noble (Genome Sciences).
WRF’s support provides important amplification to a $37.8 million Data Science Environments award to UW, Berkeley, and NYU from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a $2.8 million IGERT award from the National Science Foundation to create an interdisciplinary graduate program in data science, and core support from the University of Washington and the State of Washington.
WRF also is providing $7.2 million for UW’s Institute for Neuroengineering, which is closely linked to our data science efforts. Co-directors of that effort are Tom Daniel (Biology) and Adrienne Fairhall (Physiology & Biophysics). Chet Moritz (Physiology & Biophysics and Rehabilitation Medicine) and Rajesh Rao (CSE) co-chair the Executive Committee.
Thanks to WRF for this extraordinary investment!
Read the UW press release here.