Tao Wen, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and colleagues are working with the Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research (DeCODER) project—a joint effort of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Syracuse University, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and the University of California, Berkeley. The combined team of software cyberinfrastructure scientists and geoscientists began their four-year project on Oct. 1 and will endeavor to standardize and unify the descriptions of data and tools, facilitating the creation of efficient scientific search engines. Wen was awarded a $460,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his part in the project. He will lead the low-temperature geochemistry team, working in tandem with Professor Shuang Zhang of Texas A&M and graduate and undergraduate students from both schools. Read more.