March 2022: Grants totaling more than $530K awarded to joint UC Berkeley and TAU projects

As part of the KBT Initiative, we issued a fourth annual call for joint research grants in computational biology and bioinformatics, aiming for collaborations between researchers at UC Berkeley and at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics, TAU.

Each submitted proposal was reviewed by five or six UCB and TAU researchers and most proposals received excellent scores. Based on the reviews, four proposals were awarded grants: Three full grants and one seed grant.

The total sum awarded to new grants this year is $340,000, with a similar amount expected for the second year for the full grants. An additional sum of $192,000 is awarded to continuing full grants from last year (see here).

The winning grants are listed below. The next call for the KBT grants is expected in Fall 2022.

New grants awarded to joint projects of UCB and TAU Researchers

Full grants (4/2022-3/2024)

Priya Moorjani (Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, UCB)

and

Viviane Slon (Faculty of Medicine, TAU)

Research title: "Reconstructing our evolutionary past using sediment DNA: Best practices and Applications".

Yun Song (Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UCB)

and

Tamir Tuller (Faculty of Engineering, TAU).

Research title: "Improving prediction of missense and silent variant effect by leveraging protein language models and biophysical modeling".

Wayne Getz (Department Environmental Science Policy & Management, UCB),

Orr Spiegel (School of Zoology, TAU)

and

Sivan Toledo (School of Computer Science, TAU)

Research title:  "Computational tools for processing, analyzing and modeling high-resolution animal movement data".

Seed grant (4/2022-3/2023)

Nilah Ioannidis (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UCB)

and

Noam Shomron (Faculty of Medicine, TAU)

Research title:   "Deep learning methods for clinical variant interpretation".

Congratulations to the grant awardees!