RESEARCH & COLLABORATION
SDSC's professional staff is collaborating with UCSD researchers across a variety of disciplines in campus laboratories and in major projects - ranging from the design of new drugs to combat cancer, HIV, and other diseases, to simulations of natural phenomenon such as earthquakes, and managing massive data archives for disciplines from oceanography to astrophysics. These multi-disciplinary collaborations and cyberinfrastructure-enabled efforts offer greater understanding of systems as small as a cell or as large as the universe as they help find solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing science and society.
For example, it's difficult to understate the critical role that our oceans play in the health of the planet. For centuries, oceanographers relied on data and observations about the ocean and the seafloor below from ship-side research and cruises of limited duration. Much of what we know today about global ocean circulation, plate tectonics, global ocean productivity, and climate-ocean coupling, stems from such scientific missions.
 Schematic of an ocean observatory |
To extend these limited samples of the sea, a collaborative team including UCSD researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and SDSC have been selected to design and construct information technology and networking for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI).
This project will greatly enhance knowledge of the oceans by creating digital infrastructure that allows ocean observatories to collect, process and transmit data 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SDSC is collaborating with other UCSD scientists on a variety of oceanographic and marine sciences projects, including Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), SIOExplorer,Real-time Observatories, Applications, and Data management Network (ROADNet), and the California Cooperative Oceanic Resources Investigations (CalCOFI), one of the longest-running and most valuable collections of ocean data in the world.
 Simulated earthquake's effects on a building. |
On land, SDSC researchers are working with UCSD civil engineers and others to help lessen the devastating impacts of earthquakes on buildings, bridges and other infrastructure. For example, researchers from the Jacobs School of Engineering and SDSC -- working in the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation cyberinfrastructure center (NEESit) - recently collaborated on a visualization to gather detailed information about what happens to a building during a simulated earthquake based on the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, Calif. In related work, SDSC researchers are working with JSOE engineers to develop tools to collect data from sensors that can monitor the health of highway bridges and civil infrastructure. By detecting problems early to allow for timely repairs, this cyberinfrastructure can significantly reduce destruction and deaths from deteriorating bridges and other structures. SDSC also is collaborating in other efforts to increase safety and reduce hazards, including the California Institute for Hazards Research, and a Spatiotemporal Analysis of 9-1-1 Emergency Calls - which collects and analyzes logs of emergency call data throughout California to help responders identify emerging incidents such as industrial accidents or other sudden events by detecting spatial and temporal patterns in the calls.
In addition to bridge health, SDSC is collaborating with UCSD researchers on a range of projects affecting human health. The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), for example, provides a virtual community in which geographically distributed biomedical researchers can collaborate to advance the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. BIRN's research projects, located at some of the nation's most prestigious universities, use BIRN cyberinfrastructure that lets researchers share, compare and cross-correlate brain image data to support comprehensive studies in the field - for example, how differences in brain structure are related to brain dysfunctions, and investigations of neurological disorders using preclinical mouse models of disease. SDSC is collaborating in a multitude of other biomedical projects at UCSD, including LIPID MAPS, the Alliance for Cellular Signaling and the Molecular Biology Toolkit.
In all, SDSC plays a critical cyberinfrastructure role in a growing number, currently more than 60, of research and service collaborations with UCSD faculty and researchers. For a complete list, click on SDSC Research.
