Past Research

The establishment of a University of Minnesota campus in Rochester offers the opportunity to build on existing capacity in both the Rochester area and the Twin Cities campus to meet educational needs in Minnesota.  Since its inception in 2006, UMR has built signature programs in the area of biomedical informatics and computational biology.  In Fall 2007, UMR inaugurated the UMR BICB Graduate Traineeship Program, which funded fifteen graduate students, drawn from UMTC graduate programs and the Mayo Graduate School, on 2-year traineeships to pursue interdisciplinary work in the areas of biomedical informatics and computational biology.  This training program served as a proof of concept for successfully establishing co-advising partnerships between the University of Minnesota faculty and either Mayo Clinic or IBM and fostered interactions that led to the establishment of the BICB graduate program and continued research collaboration.  UMR sponsored nine research seed grants to foster collaboration among members of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the Hormel Institute, Mayo Clinic, and IBM.  This UMR-funded program was an early step in establishing collaborations among the five institutions to develop meaningful research collaborations with the promise of continued collaborations funded extramurally.  In addition, one postdoctoral fellowship was funded.