Bioinformatics spans many of the established biology, math, statistics and engineering disciplines, and the background and present research focus of a person in bioinformatics can be very diverse. For example, an individual might focus on protein structure, or genetics, or evolution, or epidemiology, or sequence analysis, or statistics or computer science etc. It would therefore be difficult to pre-allocate FTE positions to specific departments or divisions. The committee has not come to a consensus on the best way to proceed here. There were two differing proposals.
In one proposal, the administration could earmark a specific number of FTE positions for bioinformatics, but not allocate these to specific colleges or departments. Instead, it (through the bioinformatics committee) would specify a list of research areas in bioinformatics that we are interested in seeing develop at UCD, and give a general 'hunting license' to many departments to search for candidates in those areas. A standing bioinformatics committee would be involved in any resulting interviews. That committee, along with the involved department, would then make any recommendation to the administration to hire that particular person in one specific department.
The proposed scheme not only allows for wider participation of different units on campus, and more cohesive hiring, but it allows the new hires to have a larger voice in any subsequent hires, and builds in the flexibility to change emphases as the field develops and circumstances change. However, the scheme is not without problems. For example, different areas interview at different times of the year making it difficult to compare candidates in different fields. Moreover, there was opinions that the scheme was impractical and that departments would not have sufficient incentive to actually search for candidates.
The alternative proposal was for a bioinformatics center, or some new entity or program, to hold the FTE positions, be responsible for search and hire, in loose coordination with established departments. More formally, a division of bioinformatics, similar in structure to the division of statistics, could be established for this purpose. If such a division were established, it was expected that people in it would hold joint appointments with other departments.