The agencies are awarding close to $6 million for the first year of these awards. They anticipate spending more than $24 million on the projects over five years.

The partnership between NIGMS and NSF takes advantage of the strengths of each agency. NIGMS supports research and training in the basic biomedical sciences. NSF funds mathematical and other quantitative sciences such as physics, computer science and engineering.

"Advances in biomedical research in the 21st century will be critically dependent on collaboration between biologists and scientists in other disciplines, such as mathematics. The NIGMS-NSF partnership exemplifies the type of interdisciplinary cooperation that the new awards promote," said Dr. Judith H. Greenberg, acting director of NIGMS.

Other initiatives in which NIGMS spurs mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers to apply their quantitative expertise to biology are described at http://www.nigms.nih.gov/funding/complex_systems.html. NIGMS also recently established a Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology to be the focal point for such interdisciplinary research and training.

The new awards are listed below, alphabetically by principal investigator.

• Dynamics and Evolution of Emerging Diseases with Applications to Amphibians (Linda J.S. Allen, Texas Tech University)
• Modeling, Estimation and Control in HIV Dynamics (Thomas H. Banks, North Carolina State University)
• Cell-to-Cell Signaling in Bacterial Biofilms (David L. Chopp, Northwestern University)
• Modeling the Acute Inflammatory Response (Carson C. Chow, University of Pittsburgh)
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