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Professor Carolyn Lawrence joins GDCB faculty

Carolyn Lawrence-Dill
Professor Carolyn Lawrence

Carolyn Lawrence joined the faculty of GDCB as a tenured Associate Professor effective January 2, 2014.  Dr.  Lawrence is the first university hire as part of the Presidential High Impact Hires Initiative announced in September 2013.  This initiative is to support the hiring of new tenured or tenure-track faculty in areas of high impact to the university and state of Iowa.  News Release

More than ever before, research conducted by scientists is complex, collaborative, and multidisciplinary.  ISU researchers and their collaborators increasingly rely upon computationally-intense methods that involve high-performance computing and cloud-based services for storing, managing, manipulating, and analyzing large and complex datasets.   The development of cutting-edge computational expertise and resources on the ISU campus promises to enable researchers to develop and exploit data repositories, knowledgebases, analytic tools, and infrastructure that will allow a broad spectrum of stakeholders including biological and physical scientists, engineers, and business leaders to formulate and test novel hypotheses to develop solutions to the world’s pressing problems.

For these reasons, it is not surprising that Big Data has been identified as an area of strategic importance to ISU.  Not only does increasing activities in data analytics build upon ISU’s history of practical use of computer and information science to solve society’s grand challenges, it also promises to launch the University into new areas of prominence.  To seed and encourage activities in this area, ISU is actively recruiting twelve new faculty members across five colleges to address Big Data Challenges.

As a component of the ISU President’s High Impact Hiring Initiative, the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences are pleased to announce the recruitment of Dr. Carolyn J. Lawrence to an Associate Professorship at ISU.  Prior to this new appointment, Dr. Lawrence worked for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service where she served as the Lead Scientist for MaizeGDB, the maize genetics and genomics database.   Dr. Lawrence has conducted research in the area of computational biology for fifteen years.  She is recognized nationally and internationally as an authority on the topic of plant bioinformatics and information management and is actively engaged in outreach to the scientific community, to under-represented minorities (especially American Indian nations), and to farmers who benefit from the scientific research that underlies corn improvement.

Dr. Lawrence’s group develops computational systems and tools that enable researchers to leverage plant genetics and genomics information to better understand basic biology as well as to engineer improved plants.  Her group is interested in application of technologies to predict plant phenotype and coordinates activities to overcome challenges in the emerging field of high-throughput phenotyping. Although work by group members is not specifically limited to maize, it is by far the group’s favorite model system.

Dr. Lawrence was previously a researcher with the USDA-ARS and an assistant professor (collaborator) in GDCB.