At Georgia’s Fort Valley State University (FVSU), new leaders in agricultural and life sciences are coming face-to-face with technology that will help them solve the toughest agricultural challenges of the future. A $150,000 grant from NIFA’s 1890 Capacity Building program helped FVSU create a bioinformatics curriculum where students learn to transform biological research into informational science. In the program, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors join with computer science majors to become competent bioinformatics programmers and gain hands-on experiences in writing algorithms and coding for biological problems. Bioinformaticians use computers to store, organize, and analyze the vast amounts of data generated by scientific research.

NIFA originally published this impact in the NIFA 2016 Annual Report. Want to read about more impacts like this? Check out Fresh from the Field, a weekly bulletin showcasing transformative impacts made by grantees funded by NIFA.