No. We are a self-sustaining collaborative center and work under a hybrid business model. The Center is funded by a variety of entities, including Virginia Tech's College of Science, the Department of Statistics, Virginia Tech's investment institutes, the NIH, and other internal and external organizational units. We offer in-kind bioinformatics-related short-term consulting through our weekly (Mondays between 10:00am and 2:00pm) Zoom drop-in hours, as well as in-kind support for grant proposal preparation provided that we are included as co-investigators or key personnel. For other types of support, please reach out to discuss your research project and strategies for moving it forward.

Based on a recent survey of bioinformatics needs at Virginia Tech, the CBHDS Bioinformatics team currently focuses primarily on genomics, epigenomics, and transcriptomics. However, we do plan to expand our scope to cover proteomics and metabolomics data analyses in the near future. Please feel free to reach out to us for any type of omics data analyses you may have using our Collaboration Request Form. 

Our bioinformaticians (bioinformatic data scientists) come from various research domains and we have diverse project experiences that allow us to understand the biological questions you are addressing and the experimental design and experimental techniques you plan to use.  

Also, we are committed to fostering a collaborative environment that promotes scientific rigor and robust data analysis. Partnering with the CBHDS Bioinformatics team ensures that your research stands out for its methodological rigor, increasing the confidence in the reproducibility of your results and ultimately advancing the impact of your scientific contributions. 

We encourage you to collaborate with us early in the process, ideally during proposal writing. Therefore, you will not only benefit from our in-depth understanding of your research goals but also gain access to our proven methodologies that promotes robustness and reproducibility.

The turn-around time varies from project to project. We encourage you to send us a collaboration request for an initial meeting to discuss your needs for support. Once the project scope and goals are clear, we can estimate a timeline for your final deliverable.

Currently, courses and training workshops are provided upon request. Please submit a collaboration request to discuss educational offerings that can be tailored to your research needs.

Yes. Our Center offers guidance documents in these areas directly on our website. Please feel free to reach out to us anytime if you have any questions.

Yes, we are geographically located in Riverside 4 on the Health and Technology campus at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (FBRI) at Virginia Tech Carilion (VTC), and we're affiliated to the Fralin Life Sciences Institute (FLSI) at Virginia Tech. The FBRI & FLSI provide a range of core services (FBRI core services & FLSI core services) including sequencing and imaging data collection. Please let us know how we can provide support for data transfer, sharing, and management.

For all CBHDS bioinformatics projects, we rely on ARC (Advanced Research Computing) for data storage and analysis. ARC is a unit within Virginia Tech's Division of Information Technology, providing centralized research computing infrastructure to support the university's research community. 

To facilitate the data submission process, please see the comprehensive guidance document provided here. This document provides clear instructions for navigating the data submission process. If you have any questions or require further assistance, please email our CBHDS team at biostats@vt.edu.