Biostatistics Computer Services

Overview of Services

This is a computer services recharge center providing services to campus for contracts and grants. Biostatistics faculty work on contracts and grants for Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Public Health, Arts & Sciences as well as the following Centers: Sheps, Injury Prevention, Health Promotion Disease Prevention, Carolina Population Center, Frank Porter Graham. The recharge center provides services to contracts and grants housed in all of these areas. In order to perform the statistical computing and simulation work necessitated by UNC's contracts and grants, the department requires intense computational capacity, far greater and more varied than that required by other departments. These requirements create corresponding exceptional needs for associated hardware, software and licensing. The current computation (in terms of hardware and computation cycles) performed within Biostatistics is over five times the average for our School. The requirements for biostatistics computing are not similar to that of other UNC departments. The computing work performed by biostatisticians on grants and contracts is highly complex, highly technical, and requires specialized methodology and specialized expertise in order to maintain appropriate hardware and software. The projects in which our faculty, students, and staff are involved require extraordinary computing requirements, functionally different than typical office computing. In order to perform high dimensional analysis for research computing the resources and support requirements are far and above and beyond what is typically needed for a university department. The service center enables our biostatisticians to perform the following services for sponsored research on campus: statistical simulations, symbolic mathematic computation, and data analysis, all using specialized software. Also, to perform this work, there are extremely large requirements for storage and backup equipment ( especially for genetics and imaging data). 

Leadership

Scott Zentz
Core Director

Monika Caruso
Asst. Chair for Finance & Administration

Adrien Cooper
Accountant/Billing

Contacts