$800,000 of these funds are in collaboration with the RI NSF EPSCoR grant and will be dedicated to projects that focus on the research themes of RI NSF EPSCoR and/or utilize the existing three RI NSF EPSCoR Centers. Those themes are: marine life sciences, climate change effects on marine life especially in Narragansett Bay, and the use of technologies and approaches such as genomics, proteomics, cyber-infrastructure, bioinformatics, scientific visualization and computational biology to address the scientific questions at the heart of the RI NSF EPSCoR grant.