The three-way intersection of science, medicine, and computational technology holds unsurpassed promise and importance in the 21st century. At that juncture, the University of Rochester (UR) is especially well positioned due to its tradition of multidisciplinary research and the close adjacency of its College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering to its Medical Center. The modern day research university exists in a global digital world. Large-scale, high-performance computational (HPC) resources have become essential to maintain the long-term viability of the University of Rochester's research endeavor and, furthermore, to achieve transformational results in real time. This mission of the HSCCI is to facilitate access to HPC resources for biomedical research. These include a combination of hardware, research personnel, and support staff. The UR seeks to develop the center through corporate partnerships, institutional support, federal research grants, and state programs. At the heart of the HSCCI is a partnership with IBM and the BlueGene supercomputer that we intend to be the largest of its kind dedicated solely to health sciences.
In developing those parts of the University of Rochester's strategic plans that deal with future investments across the spectrum of science and engineering, we very explicitly recognized the central importance of biology as the realm that presents the richest range of fundamentally important research challenges during the first half of the 21st century and where investments promise the greatest transformation in our lives. Recognition of the opportunities in biological sciences is bringing together the clinical and basic sciences and engineering in ways that increasingly blur the boundaries between all of them. The most exciting work draws the physical and engineering sciences into biology and medicine in powerful new ways.
These considerations have framed the University's planning for its investments in science, engineering, and medicine over the next 10 years and beyond. In identifying the initiatives we can pursue with the greatest impact and distinction, we have focused on domains where we have already made strong investments or see unusual opportunities for future investment. These initiatives are often in domains that draw together several disciplines. We have a distinct talent for multidisciplinary collaboration, fostered by contiguous campuses and the absence of barriers to inter-school cooperation. Indeed, we are explicitly organized to make partnership easy. The result is a genuinely nimble multidisciplinary enterprise, on which our plans expressly capitalize.