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The economic strength of United States hinges on its leadership in key technological areas. Computing is a key technology enabler as reflected by a New York Times quote “Every Science is Computer Science” Unfortunately, the computing education system has not kept pace with the unprecedented research growth and societal impact of computing. As a country, we are at the risk of losing our technological thought leadership to other nations that are investing heavily in research and education infrastructure. This project hopes to precipitate transformation in computing education for the U.S.technological leadership to triumph and develop future computing professionals that will serve as vanguards of the computing field. The proposed project will serve as the conceptual development phase of a multifaceted transformative endeavor that will revitalize computing education in a multi-pronged fashion.
Intellectual Merit: The Augustine Report from National Academies identifies that research, higher education, K-12 science and math education, and the support for innovation are critical for a brighter future. In consonance with this recommendation, this project envisions a coordinated advancement of cutting-edge research, undergraduate education, and K-12 education, with a stated commitment for supporting innovation by the administration. The plan involves tapping the resources of the active research programs at Penn State in areas which lie at the interface of Biology and Computing and building a model to facilitate dynamic integration of research advances into the undergraduate curriculum. In addition, through outreach activities and teaching workshops, we will facilitate curricula transformation in resource constrained four year colleges and K-12 programs. We anticipate this project to serve as a role model for leveraging the significant research activities at Research Universities to catalyze change in the undergraduate curriculum of an entire region.
This project brings together 23 faculty members from 14 academic disciplines with a vision of nurturing future leaders in areas at the intersection of Biology and Computing. A recent report from the National Research Council and the NIH roadmap both emphasize that twenty-first century biology will be an information science, asserting the importance of computing to biology. Biological computing encompasses biomedical computing and health informatics. Further, biological systems have evolved over thousands of years to be adept at some challenges that are akin to those facing computing systems and can serve as an inspiration for solving these difficult problems. On the other hand, the advances in computing systems make it possible to mimic and augment the functionality of biological systems. Interfacing biology and computing into our computer science curriculum has the goal to train a future workforce to tap these exciting synergies.
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