Intro/Personnel



		Principal Investigator/Program Director Williams, Robert W.
		Personnel This is a unique multidisciplinary collaboration between neuroscientists and geneticists, all of whom have strong backgrounds in bioinformatics and computer applications development. There is tremendous leverage in this collaboration, which has already produced impressive results. Robert W. Williams, UT Memphis, will serve as Program Director, PI of Project 2 (the iScope), and director of the Administrative Core and the Genotyping and Mouse Colony Core. Dr. Williams, a developmental neurobiologist and mouse geneticist, has developed and maintained extensive Internet resources both for gene mapping and for the analysis of the mouse CNS and eye.
		Glenn D. Rosen, Associate Professor of Neurology (Neuroscience) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, will serve as PI of Project 1 (MBL) and director of the Neurohistology Core. Dr. Rosen is an expert stereologist and neuroanatomist, and his strong background in statistics and morphometry makes him particularly competent to develop the MBL. Jonathan Nissanov, co-director of the Drexel University Center for Vertebrate Brain Mapping, will serve as PI of Project 3 (NeuroCartographer) and will also contribute to Project 2 (the iScope). Dr. Nissanov has a strong background in neuroscience, engineering, and bioinformatics. He has expertise in developing image analysis tools and helped to design, assemble, and test a robotic slide-handling system. Kenneth Manly at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute will serve as PI of Project 4 (the Neurogenetics Tool Box). Dr. Manly is a well-known geneticist and the author of a set of powerful software programs for gene mapping (Map Manager, Map Manager QT, and Map Manager QTX). Dan Goldowitz, Professor of Neurobiolog at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, is a coinvestigator on Projects 1 and 2. Dr. Goldowitz, an expert neurogeneticist, is closely involved in the NIH mouse mutagenesis initiative and is the principal investigator of the Tennessee Mouse Genomics Consortium mutagenesis RFA application. Melburn Park, Associate Professor of Neurobiology at UT Memphis, will be a coinvestigator for Project 2 (the iScope). Dr. Park is both a neuroanatomist and an accomplished programmer. He has written numerous large software programs for real-time data acquisition, iterative voltage clamp analysis, three-dimensional neuron reconstruction, text processing, mapping, and image processing using powerful deconvolution methods. Oleh J. Tretiak has been Director of the Computer Vision Center for Vertebrate Brain Mapping at Drexel University, an NIH Biomedical Technology Resource, for the past 15 years. He has a strong background in engineering with a specific focus in computer vision and its application to aligning and segmenting histological material. Much of his research effort has dealt directly with the brain segmentation problem as it applies to rodent brains.

		Informatics Center for Mouse Neurogenetics (HBP)
		Investigating Genetic Variation
		Generic Resources versus Specific Goals
		Rationale
		The External Advisory Board
		Institutional Support for this Program Project
		Conclusion