Under an $11-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) will lead a network of northern New England institutions in recruiting, training, and supporting young quantitative biologists to teach and conduct research into the ways that genes and the environment work together to trigger and prevent disease.

With computational geneticist Jason Moore as principal investigator, DMS will establish an NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE)...Moore, DMS' Third Century Professor of Genetics and Community and Family Medicine, adds that the research projects will encourage junior faculty to examine different aspects of the way genes and environment interact in causing or preventing diseases—such as bladder cancer—that show a higher incidence in New England. Dartmouth faculty serving as principal investigators in two of the COBRE's first four research projects will be DMS biostatistician Jiang Gui, PhD, and Thayer School of Engineering biostatistician Mark Borsuk, PhD. Heading additional projects will be immunologist Carol Kim, PhD, from the University of Maine, and computational biologist Clare Bates Congdon, PhD, from the University of Southern Maine.