Mission and supported activities

Inspiration

“The most important job of senior faculty is to mentor junior faculty and students.” These are the words that Professor James P. Taylor, the Ralph S. O'Connor Professor at the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, said and lived by. This, he believed, was imperative to advance science in a way that facilitated diversity and inclusion. The mission of this foundation is to continue his legacy through a multifaceted approach.

Mission

To enable and support the mentoring of young and diverse faculty and students to do the best Open Science computational biology.

Vision

To be the best organization to support all aspects of Open Data Science

Graduate student scholarships

The Foundation provides support for graduate students to attend conferences in computational biology and data science, where they can present their work and form connections with other researchers in the field. Initially the foundation provided support for students and postdocs attending Biological Data Science , Genome Informatics, and Biology of Genomes meetings at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).

Academic Mentorship

The Foundation will later expand its reach as a platform for academic mentorship. First, it will operate to spark mentoring relationships among the larger computational biology and data science community. As part of membership, faculty and students will have an opportunity to participate in periodic mentorship meetings. We expect an enthusiastic response to this opportunity, and will recruit additional team members to provide organizational structure if necessary.

Student Outreach

In its later stages, the Foundation will sponsor in-person visits from students (high school or college age) to its hotspots, which currently include Johns Hopkins and Penn State University. These visits are meant to attract new scholars to computational biology and data science, and in particular to form connections and opportunities for members of underrepresented minorities.

Foundation board and governance

The objectives and activities of the foundation are governed by the foundation board. The current board includes the following members:

Please consider contributing to continue James Taylor's legacy.