NSF-funded project designed to expand teaching of population genetics via Google App Engine Cloud
The University at Buffalo is using a $250K National Science Foundation grant to spread the teaching of evolutionary biology across the cloud.
Specifically, the school is using Google App Cloud Engine to make teaching population genetics more accessible to UB students but also to middle and high school students whose schools might be skittish about this often politically-charged topic. In particular, the program allows UB to offer freshmen the opportunity to immediately dive into labs rather than get stuck in big lecture halls.
The videogame-like Pop! World program developed by UB can now be accessed in a preliminary version, enabling you to plug in numbers to track everything from migration to mutation of populations. UB researchers say the Adobe Flash-based program makes this mathematically heavy topic more digestible.
“Almost all of evolutionary theory can be mathematically modeled if you know enough information to begin with,” says Jessica Poulin (above, middle), PhD, research assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, who developed Pop! World with principal investigator Bina Ramamurthy (above, left), PhD, research associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Katharina Dittmar (above, right), PhD, assistant professor of biological sciences. “If you enter the correct parameters into the computer, the computer will tell you what will happen after one generation or a thousand generations. I wanted students to be exposed to something that made them feel they were actually watching evolution happen. I wanted it to be captivating.”
A more fleshed-out version of Pop! World should be operational by fall thanks to the NSF grant, according to UB.
In case you’re wondering, the NSF isn’t playing cloud computing favorites. For example, about a year ago it struck a deal with Microsoft that gives NSF-supported researchers access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
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