NESCent (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center) Information

NESCent, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, is a collaborative effort of Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Our mission is to facilitate broadly synthetic research to address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. Synthetic research in evolutionary biology takes many forms but includes integrating novel data sets and models to address important problems within a discipline, developing new analytical approaches and tools, and combining methods and perspectives from multiple disciplines to answer and even create new fundamental scientific questions. NESCent facilitates such synthetic research by providing an environment for fertile interactions among scientists. Our Science and Synthesis program sponsors postdoctoral fellows and sabbatical scholars as resident scientists, and two kinds of meetings, working groups and catalysis meetings. Catalysis meetings provide a novel mechanism for bringing together diverse research communities and cultures to identify common interests, while working groups provide an opportunity for scientists to work together intensively on fundamental synthetic questions over a several-year period. Our Informatics program provides state of the art informatics tools to visiting and in-house scientists and aims to take the lead in assembling novel databases and developing new analytical tools for evolutionary biology. Finally it is sponsoring a major initiative to provide a digital data repository for work in evolutionary biology. NESCent’s Education and Outreach group communicates the results of evolutionary biology research to the general public and scientific community, provides outreach to groups who are underrepresented in evolutionary biology and works to improve evolution education.