The San Francisco-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced a five-year, $1.2 million grant to Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University to support the development of new methods for analyzing information created in data-intensive fields such as astronomy and genetics.

The grant to astronomer and computer scientist Alexander Szalay will fund the explorations of three post-doctoral fellows into advanced scientific data analysis. For his part, Szalay, who has spent the past decade on the components necessary for the development of a multidisciplinary approach to data analysis that can scale beyond terabytes as part of a project known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, will use a new approach to analyzing large data sets to solve what he calls "problems on the frontiers of science."

"The massive amounts of data emerging from our newest instruments — telescopes, particle detectors, gene sequencers — demand a novel method of analysis that coalesces the skills of astronomers, biologists, and others with those of the computer scientist, the computational scientist, and the statistician," said Szalay.

"This project has the potential to transform not just one or two fields, but the way we approach a broad array of problems across many disciplines," added university president William R. Brody. "My thanks go to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for recognizing the possibilities and making a very special investment in the future of science."