Dr. Bruce Holm, senior associate dean for the school of medicine, will be the first individual to hold a new administrative office, created to keep pace with UB's advances in the high-tech area of biomedical sciences. As UB's senior vice provost, Holm will oversee a variety of new projects affiliated with the university's recent grant acquisitions.
Holm will represent Elizabeth Capaldi in the Office of the Provost as the chief administrator for the Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics, the Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) Center for Disease Modeling and Therapy Discovery, and the Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technologies (CAT).
"These new initiatives will bring UB into national prominence as a major player in the post-genomic science," stated Capaldi, in an e-mail. "We hope to create thousands of new jobs in Buffalo in bioinformatics and related fields."
Holm's appointment comes on the heels of a $200 million grant UB received from Gov. George E. Pataki to establish one of the state's three centers for excellence in Buffalo.
"We needed a senior provost because of all the new initiatives we have funded by the state and others," stated Capaldi. "Dr. Holm is a superb scientist is this area and will integrate the science with my office and with our external partners."
Buffalo's Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics is at the heart of the university's efforts to build on existing partnerships, which include the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Institute, and to foster a multitude of new academic and corporate partnerships, which, in the future, would create thousands of new jobs in the area and galvanize the Western New York economy.
As chair of UB's STAR Center, Holm will regularly interact with the STAR Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a city housing a Center for Excellence in Optoelectronics, and would like to better formalize links with other academic institutions like Columbia University and Syracuse University, furthering the possibilities of integrated research bioinformatics and photonics, respectively.
"We're in the right peer group," said Holm. "But those peers are very aggressive and not used to losing out on recruits. We need to play on our strengths and establish what makes UB unique."
Holm is in discussions with two "very large companies," one from New York and
Bioinformatics uses supercomputers to analyze biological data and is widely multidisciplinary, allowing for a variety of specialized disciplines to interact in a mutually beneficial environment.
"We have faculty members that are already doing things that are just such a natural fit with this kind of initiative in chemistry, computer science, engineering and biological science," said Holm. "We've got some folks in the medical school that are doing some projects with folks in media studies."
The media studies students working in collaboration with the medical students have developed cost-effective virtual reality applications, including training applications in virtual surgery. "They have gotten incredibly excited about what they're learning from each other," said Holm.
Holm underscored that it is these kinds of innovative projects that generate cooperative learning and excitement.
"Interestingly enough, when that happens and you apply some strategy and appropriate investment, then you can get regions that actually grab onto all that excitement and creativity," he said. "And that's what creates industry."
In collaboration with Dr. Robert Genco, recently appointed vice provost and director of the Office of Science, Technology and Economic Outreach (STOR), Holm will help commercialize the university's academic discoveries.
"We have to concentrate on the new projects we are doing," said Holm. "We pulled in these partners and there are expectations that we are going to be building buildings, recruiting faculty and doing well-funded science that will spin-off new developments."
"It's what we do with [the money received] to help build UB and build up the faculty and make them excited about the job they're coming to everyday. I think that as time goes on, you can use this as a rallying point for a lot of other university areas."
