February 2, 2009

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new Indiana University internship program will provide students with valuable experience on the business side of life sciences information technology, while interns apply traditional business techniques toward helping IU technology experts advance IU medical and life sciences research. The joint internship program, being offered by the IU Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) and the Center for the Business of Life Sciences (CBLS) at the Kelley School of Business, will employ a total of six student interns on the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses during the spring 2009 semester.

Using market analysis, an intern working on the IU Bloomington campus will identify the data management needs of the IU life sciences research community. The goal of this work is to help PTI's technology experts better understand the needs of IU's life scientists, allowing them to form new strategic partnerships and develop highly targeted data management solutions specifically catered to the needs of the life sciences community.

William Barnett

"While IU's life sciences IT team has a wide range of expertise and cutting edge software tools available to assist the life sciences research community, we recognize that we need to better understand researcher's data management needs," said William Barnett, associate director of PTI. "By partnering with the Kelley School, we will be able to develop a much clearer understanding of who our market is and what our strategic technology priorities should be."

Another five interns will work together on the Indianapolis campus as part of a Master of Science in Information Systems capstone project to complete a market analysis of the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) initiative, matching caBIG software tools and resources to the needs of IU School of Medicine (IUSM) researchers. The NCI developed caBIG tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with the research and treatment of cancer. As part of this work, the interns will receive mentoring from staff within PTI and the IUSM Biostatistics Department, as well as from Dr. Anne Massey, professor of information systems at the Kelley School.

Larry Davidson

Kelley School Professor and CBLS Director Lawrence Davidson says the partnership was a natural fit for the Kelley School because life sciences research is an important and rapidly growing part of the U.S. and Indiana business landscape, and information technologies are the single most important tool in that success.

"The internship program allows students to apply the world-class life sciences business education they receive at the Kelley school toward solving real-world technology problems in the life sciences community," Davidson said. "Students will become familiar with the cutting edge technologies that will be a vital part of our life sciences economy in the coming decades, while it is still in its earliest stages. This will make them uniquely qualified to leverage these technologies as they inevitably move into the commercial market."

For more information on CBLS, please see http://www.kelley.iu.edu/cbls/ .

About Pervasive Technology Institute

Funded by a $15 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University includes researchers and technologists from the IU School of Informatics, the IU School of Law, and the Research Technologies division of University Information Technology Services, as well as researchers employed directly by the Institute.

PTI is made up of three research centers, each focusing on a specific type of technology research. The Digital Science Center focuses on creating an intuitively usable cyberinfrastructure with tremendous capabilities for supporting collaboration and computation. The Data to Insight Center creates tools to understand and gain insight from the vast quantities of data now produced in digital form. The Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research will lead the creation of IT security policy, security monitoring tools and secure applications in critical areas of cyberinfrastructure, including personalized health. See http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9302.html