High school teachers in southwest Pennsylvania will get training in advanced computing technologies in the biological sciences—bioinformatics—thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Grable Foundation to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The grant will fund PSC’s BEST (Bioinformatics Education for STudents) program, including a summer workshop for regional science teachers. “The Grable Foundation is committed to helping young people succeed,” says D’Ann Swanson, Senior Program Officer at The Grable Foundation. “If school districts can expand their course offerings to include groundbreaking topics such as bioinformatics, it will give the region’s youth a real advantage when it comes to post-secondary learning and career options.” Science is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary. Fields like biology traditionally did not make much use of computation. But biologists today are working more and more with computational scientists. Students can no longer pursue careers in fields like genetics, cell biology, population science, oncology and many other medically relevant fields without some background in bioinformatics. Lack of homegrown skills is sending these opportunities overseas. At the high school level, U.S. students get very limited exposure to these concepts. Learn more at http://www.psc.edu/index.php/news-and-media/press-releases/2368-virtual-file-system-will-save-vast-computer-storage-space