View the original news release.
You may have noticed the construction work in progress next to the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB), at the corner of the roundabout on the Hill campus. At the former site of the Bevatron facility, the new building will house the Biological and Environmental Program Integration Center (BioEPIC). This center for multidisciplinary (where researchers from different fields work independently towards a common research goal) and transdisciplinary (where researchers from different fields holistically approach research problems together) research will combine the relevant capabilities of Biosciences Area (BSA) and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) in one location. BioEPIC aims to harness the power of microbes to solve our most urgent environmental, water, and energy challenges. The Projects and Infrastructure Modernization team is managing the construction project.
Research News spoke with Eoin Brodie, deputy director of EESA’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, and Susannah Tringe, division director of BSA’s Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division, about BioEPIC and the opportunities and challenges provided by multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary science.
Why is BioEPIC important for society and for the Lab?
Eoin: Our world is facing many challenges related to climate change: challenges like providing feedstocks for alternative energy and biomanufacturing, capturing CO2, ensuring the availability of clean water, and predicting the response of ecosystems to climate change. Biological-environmental interactions like those in the soil between microbes and plants are critical to understand and to harness for a sustainable future. There’s a huge gap between understanding these interactions at the simplified lab scale and at the ecosystem scale where management occurs, and there is a critical need to bridge these scales and leverage new discoveries and capabilities. At Berkeley Lab we have the capabilities to take our research from the controlled environments of petri dishes in labs into the complexity of ecosystems, to bring these scales together. We have a unique opportunity to bridge this gap.
What are some BioEPIC projects?
Susannah: There are currently four science focus areas (SFAs) that will move into BioEPIC. The Biosciences Area leads ENIGMA, which creates predictive models of the impacts of microbial communities on ecosystem processes, and m-CAFEs, which looks at how plant-microbe-soil interactions impact plant growth and health.
Eoin: EESA leads the other two, Watershed Function, which studies changes to the mountainous watersheds that provide 60 to 90% of water resources worldwide, and Belowground Biogeochemistry, which studies the soil response and feedbacks to changing climate. This is transdisciplinary work, which means that researchers from different fields are working side by side on these projects, rather than multidisciplinary work, where scientists work separately while contributing toward the same research goal.
How did BioEPIC come about?
Eoin: The seed was planted almost two decades ago. Through the Berkeley Lab leadership development program, a number of early career researchers, including Trent Northen and Aindrila Mukhopadhyay from Biosciences and me, proposed the concept of a research center to bridge the scale gaps between microbial research and ecosystem research. Shortly after that, the Kavli Foundation, working with Berkeley Lab leadership, facilitated multi-disciplinary workshops on microbiome research; catalyzing a call for a unified effort in microbiome sciences.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiated an interagency effort that evolved into the National Microbiome Initiative. Lab leadership, including Paul Alivisatos, Jay Keasling, Susan Hubbard, Mary Maxon, and Horst Simon, and scientists Peter Nico (EESA) and Trent, Louise Glass, Paul Adams, and Jim Bristow from Biosciences, prepared the science case to build a center on the former Bevatron site at the Lab. Area and Lab Operations team members Helen Cademartori, Lisa Kelly, Joe Harkins, Glenn Kubiak, Richard Stanton, and Stan Tuholski provided input on the physical aspects of the building. The proposal was sent to DOE and to the Science Laboratories Infrastructure Program (SLI) and was approved in 2018; the building broke ground in late 2021. It’s been a journey, but many people supported the idea and support has continued to grow.
What is the timeline for the BioEPIC move-in? How is collaborative work getting done in the meantime?
Susannah: We’re expecting a move-in date of late 2024, possibly early 2025. In the meantime, we are increasing opportunities to get teams together across scientific focus areas (SFAs). During Earth Week in 2022 we held a BioEPIC science week including a SLAM competition, which we repeated in 2023, and we held a joint visioning session last summer. We’re trying to foster increased interactions ahead of the move-in.
What are the opportunities and challenges for multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary science?
Susannah: One of the biggest challenges for multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is learning each other’s language and the canon of knowledge that is accepted in each field. It means that researchers need to be open to learning new things and to ensure that their own research is accessible. For example, the BioEPIC SLAM event provided opportunities for our early career researchers to present their work in a way that’s understandable by a broader audience.
Eoin: I agree that a shared vocabulary is an important challenge. Another challenge is sharing information and knowledge across scales – it’s a challenge for many fields of science today. Fortunately we now have tools, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), that can accelerate this process. We will measure and test interactions at different scales and then use AI/ML approaches and state-of-the-art computer models to extrapolate. Down the road, quantum computing will also be an important tool to help us handle the complexity of processes we are simulating and seeking to analyze.
The collaborations represented in the new BioEPIC facility extend to many Areas at the Lab; in addition to our partnership with Computing Sciences, we are working with Applied Physics in the Physical Sciences Area on sensor technologies that are developed for the Advanced Light Source, which is in the Energy Sciences Area. There are so many opportunities for transdisciplinary work at Berkeley Lab; we just need to unearth them.
What are you most excited about?
Susannah: After three years of being under pandemic restrictions, I’m excited about being able to work with larger groups of people in person, in both formal and informal meetings. I’m also excited about the fabricated ecosystems and other technologies that we will be building into the first floor of BioEPIC, such as EcoFABs and EcoPODs – these are specialized capabilities that will be available to others at the Lab.
Eoin: I’m excited to work with Biosciences’ world-class expertise, in specialties such as the genetic modification of plants and microbes. In EESA we do study complex microbial communities, but the Biosciences team brings incredible depth in this area. Likewise, EESA will bring an additional level of understanding of ecosystem physical, chemical, and biological properties at multiple scales to help understand how specific organisms operate in the natural world. It will be fun to discover the things we can do together that we can’t do separately.
What do you want other Lab researchers to know about multi- and transdisciplinary science at the Lab?
Susannah: I’d encourage researchers across the Lab to get to know their colleagues in other disciplines – and operations! They can help you learn about resources and capabilities at the Lab that could benefit your research goals. And get to know BioEPIC – we have facilities that you may be interested in. We’ll even (eventually) have a greenhouse on the top floor.
Eoin: Big advances in science happen at the interface between disciplines, so we need to create opportunities to bring people together, to create interactions. BioEPIC is just one example of these opportunities; there are many more, from biomanufacturing to climate change mitigation, between computing sciences, physics, and all the other disciplines. Being at Berkeley Lab gives us phenomenal opportunities to do this.
