Facilitating Interdisciplinary Collaboration Between Academia and Commercial Institutions

Presented by:  Carlos Sosa, Ph.D., IBM and BICB, University of Minnesota, Rochester 

Traditionally, university research is based on public funding with two main objectives: education and discovery research.  Under this paradigm the government is the main provider of academic funds [Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff ].  However, more recently, a model has emerged in which universities have extended the traditional model to incorporate not only basic research but also  more applied research with entrepreneurial focus.  This is a result of closer collaboration with industry.  In particular, institutions such as NIH are promoting efficient and effective collaboration among academic institutions, government and industry.  An example of this collaboration sponsored by NIH is the Clinical Translational Science Awards Institutions, private industry and non-profit organizations working together to develop commercially viable therapies and diagnostics.  In this presentation we show that this type of collaboration can be extended to include an IT organization as part of a Life Sciences partnership.  We illustrate this by showing several success stories of such collaborations as part of the recently formed Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology (BICB) program as part of the University of Minnesota Rochester.  In addition, we explore attributes and organizational requirements to make university-industry collaboration successful with BICB as an example.   

About the Presenter

Carlos P. Sosa is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the High-Performance Computing Solutions Development Group at IBM, where he has been the team lead of the Chemistry and Life Sciences group since 2006. For the past 20 years, his work focused on scientific applications with emphasis in Life Sciences and parallel programming. He received a Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Wayne State University and completed his post-doctoral work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research expertise falls broadly in the areas of molecular simulations, bioinformatics, and parallel computing. His research in parallel computing focuses on scaling applications in these areas to emerging hardware architectures such as the IBM flagships Blue Gene and POWER7 supercomputers. He has led numerous strategic projects at IBM on addressing challenging scientific applications with cutting-edge high-performance computing technologies. He is the author of four IBM books as well as numerous publications in international journals and conferences. Currently, he holds an editorial board membership of Current Drug Discovery Technologies, and is also a visiting member of IBM Academy of Technology. He is an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology at the University of Minnesota Rochester.