Program Summary:  The National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) are intended to be part of the national infrastructure in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology.  The consortium portal is http://www.ncbcs.org/.   There are eight Centers that cover biophysical modeling, biomedical ontologies, information integration, tools for gene-phenotype and disease analysis, systems biology, image analysis, and health information modeling and analysis. The centers create innovative software programs and other tools that enable the biomedical community to integrate, analyze, model, simulate, and share data on human health and disease. Each Center has Cores that are focused on (i) biomedical computational science and (ii) driving biological projects (DBPs) with the intent to drive the interaction between computational and biomedical computational science. There are numerous efforts in education and training that emanate from the Centers and there is an annual all hands meeting.  In addition to the Centers, the NIH and other government agencies have a number of funding announcements that are summarized in the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) Funding Page http://www.bisti.nih.gov/funding/index.asp.  This also includes a program for Collaborations with National Centers for Biomedical Computing.  Under the collaborations program, over the course of the program 225 applications for funding have been reviewed at NIH and 33 have been awarded.

This is the culmination of the Year of Outreach which has so far included a special session at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting 2012 in Long Beach on July 16 that focused on NCBC accomplishments.  In addition, a set of special articles was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

The main goal of the meeting is to showcase not only the research, training, and outreach in computational science but also highlight the connections with related research programs such as CTSA, TCNP, Computational P41s, and the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) consortium.  The impact of this meeting is expected to be the lasting connections that are built up between programs in biomedical computing and computational biology at NIH.