TROY, N.Y. -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been selected as one of six universities nationwide to be awarded a two-year, nearly $1 million planning grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that will provide a foundation for the development of a center for cheminformatics research. The Rensselaer Exploratory Center for Cheminformatics Research (RECCR) will bring together an interdisciplinary research team to seek improved understanding of the relationships between chemical structure and function for use in biotechnology applications.

"We are working to build a center for cheminformatics research that will allow Rensselaer to strengthen the rich collaborative environment that already exists here between research groups specializing in health-related laboratory projects and those with expertise in the area of data science," said Curt M. Breneman, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and principal investigator for the project. "One major application of this work will be to identify emerging technologies that can predict chemical compound behavior for use in drug discovery and other biotechnology processes."

Cheminformatics is the application of computational techniques to problems in chemistry, such as understanding chemical structures and their biological activities for use in drug discovery. Bioinformatics is the application of computational techniques to problems in biology, such as making sense of large amounts of gene sequencing data for use in identifying genetic markers of disease.

The RECCR will engage researchers from varied disciplines who are interested in using cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and machine learning techniques to predict the behavior of chemical compounds in biological systems. Participating departments at Rensselaer include chemistry and chemical biology, chemical and biological engineering, computer science, decision sciences and engineering systems, mathematical sciences, and physics, appli
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Contact: Tiffany Lohwater
lohwat@rpi.edu
518-276-6542
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
13-Oct-2005

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