1. Bioinformatics Training Program Raymond J. Carroll Department of Statistics Faculty of Nutrition Texas A&M University http://stat.tamu.edu/~carroll

2. Official Name Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and the Biological Basis of Nutrition and Cancer Hence the clever acronym: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/b3nc

3. History Roughly in 1997, Steve Safe started the idea of a Center for Environmental and Rural Health He needed a Biostatistics Research Core, and Jim Calvin nominated me.

4. History A major point of the CERH was to foster interdisciplinary contacts Steve and Jim said: well you do nutrition, go talk to them I met Nancy Turner at a reception to start off

5. History Nancy first started telling me about her data, namely the idea of colonic crypts She drew these by hand: I wished I had saved the original pictures

6. History I then started talking with Nancy, Joanne Lupton and their student, Meeyoung Hong Very cool: hierarchical functional data! With location effects!

7. History Naisyin Wang and I then gave the problem of these data to our student, Jeff Morris Jeff started spending lots of time in the lab, and became very knowledgeable about the biology

8. History I was at U-Penn for 2 years, and just before coming back spent a week at the Canyon Ranch in Tucson Very fancy food, nothing to do

9. History I wrote the first draft of the original Bioinformatics training program grant at Canyon ranch I called a person at the NCI, and she suggested that I apply for a R25T, rather than a T32. The difference: faculty salary money!

10. History We also met Ed Dougherty of EE, who wrote an early paper on cDNA arrays Robb Chapkin was a huge help in the proposal as well

11. Our Goal Our goal is to train statistically oriented individuals (Biostatisticians, Statisticians, Signal Processors, etc.) To function as independent researchers in a multidisciplinary environment focusing on Nutrition and cancer.

12. The Challenge Even the Program Officer at the NCI thought we would not be able to recruit trainees Because of the restriction to U.S. citizens and permanent residents

13. They Were Wrong! We recruited a Danh Nguyen from statistics (2001) Aniruddha Datta from EE

14. Recruits in 2002 Two statisticians: Qi Zheng Mahlet Tadesse

15. Our First Pre-doc (2002) Christie Spinka

16. Recruits in 2003 Ivan Ivanov Kimberley Drews Wenjiang Fu

17. Recruits in 2004 Michael Swartz He has a twin brother Richard, but these are actually two of Michael (I think)

18. Resubmission in 2005 We have added a rotation through the Genomics Facility Core We have a systematic plan for rotations through labs, with a final choice late in fall of year 1

19. Resubmission in 2005 We received the best score in our round!! We are now funded through July 2011 I am looking forward (not!) to 2010 resubmission

20. Recruits in 2005 Erchin Serepedin Lan Zhou

21. Recruits in 2006 Ann Chen Sujay Datta

22. Other Mentors Marina Vannucci Guoyao WuRosemary Walzem David Dahl Jerry Tsai Phil Mirkes Laurie Davidson Bani Mallick

23. Future Plans

24. Administrative Assistant Joyce Sutherland runs the day-to-day operations for our Program, and for the proposed new Center for Statistical Bioinformatics

25. Thanks! http://stat.tamu.edu/~carroll