An ISU statistician has been named the new interim director for the Bioinformatics Center. Hal Stern, professor of statistics, is the first statistician to be given this honor. He will serve as the interim director of the Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics, a center of the Plant Sciences Institute. “Bioinformatics is an increasing, excellent area because it is getting inside organisms and studying how things happen. It usually refers to getting information from molecular data, DNA, looking at protein and others,” Stern said. Stern currently teaches undergraduate and graduate classes. He joined the ISU statistics team in 1994 and was hired as a professor in 1997. Stern said he also does research in applications and generating statistics to biological problems, including problems in animal science, zoology and genetics. “[Stern] brings great strength in the area of statistics and is a strong faculty member in research and teaching,” said Colin Scanes, interim director of the Plant Sciences Institute. “For too long only biological, molecular and mathematical individuals were involved. We really needed to bring in the skills of statisticians.” In his new position, Stern said he hopes to see many advancements in the Bioinformatics Center. Currently, the center helps scientists access and interpret the large amounts of data on thousands of individual plants through molecular genetics. “This center takes their faculty from a large number of colleges and is working on collecting and analyzing large amounts of bioinformatic data, especially molecular data over the past five to ten years,” he said. Stern said he is looking forward to the future of the center and its efforts worldwide. “We’re trying to increase ties with University of Iowa’s bioinformatics, which is focused more on the human side of it. Someday we hope the two groups might develop into an excellence of biomedical studies,” he said. The institute will begin its national search for a permanent dean soon and hopes to have it filled by next summer.