The projects of 15 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY21 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.
Biosciences Area 2020 LDRD Projects
The projects of 14 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY20 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including: developing closed-loop plastics from biogenic feedstocks; reimagining a root system optimized for plant-microbe interactions; and creating computational tools for extracting macromolecular conformational dynamics. Lab-wide, 96 projects were selected from a field of 168 proposals. Biosciences Area efforts account for 18.5 percent of the $23 million allocated.
Advancing Watershed Understanding through Exascale Simulation and Machine Learning
ExaSheds is a new project led by Berkeley Lab PI Carl Steefel of the Earth and Environmental Science Area (EESA) and Oak Ridge National Lab co-PI Scott Painter. It represents the first systematic effort to leverage powerful machine learning and exascale computing, applied to ever-larger and more-complex data obtained from watershed field observations, to gain a predictive understanding of watershed behavior. The project is funded by DOE Biological and Environmental Research and will initially take advantage of datasets being collected at the East River, Colorado watershed site, which has been developed as part of Berkeley Lab’s DOE Watershed Function Science Focus Area (SFA). The interdisciplinary research team includes Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division co-deputy Ben Brown, as well as partners at Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest National Labs.
Read more from EESA.
EcoFABs: Fabricated Microbial Ecosystem Models to Advance Microbiome Research
Biosciences’ Trent Northen and Ben Brown, along with collaborators from more than a dozen institutions, co-authored a paper published in Nature Methods that outlines a vision for fabricated model microbial ecosystems (EcoFABs) and their potential impact on microbiome science.
Biosciences Area FY19 LDRD Projects
The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY19 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including the harnessing of microbiome data to uncover patterns of mutualism, evaluating radiobiological effects of laser-accelerated ion beams, improving bioenergy yield under drought stress, and the application of machine learning in tomogram segmentation. Lab-wide, 89 projects were selected from a field of 158 proposals. Biosciences Area efforts account for 15.07 percent of the $22.2 million allocated.
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