Science Funding · Organismal Biology

NSF Bets $20 Million That Biology’s Existing Data Can Predict Resilience

A new synthesis centre at Columbia University will not collect a single new specimen. Instead it will turn AI loose on decades of organism data, from genomes to ecosystems, to work out why some species cope with environmental change and others do not.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Science and Research

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded $20 million to establish the National Synthesis Center for Organismal Resilience, or NSCORE, a new centre led by Columbia University that will pair organismal biologists with computer scientists to understand, and eventually predict, how living things respond to a changing environment. The award was announced by the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences on 8 September 2026.

A research centre that generates no new data

Synthesis centres are a specific NSF instrument, and the distinction matters. According to NSF, they do not fund the collection of new data. They exist to integrate what has already been gathered, across disciplines and across scales, so that multidisciplinary teams can ask questions that no single dataset can answer. NSCORE joins two existing NSF BIO synthesis centres, the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab and the National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences.

The premise is that biology now has a data problem of abundance rather than scarcity. NSF describes a rapidly growing body of organism-derived data spanning molecules, whole organisms, populations and ecosystems, and NSCORE’s job is to draw the mechanisms of resilience out of it. Columbia’s own announcement adds that the centre will couple large datasets of individual organismal traits with environmental data from remote sensing, global monitoring networks and real-time sensors, and that it is funded for five years.

What NSF expects for its money

The NSF announcement sets out three goals: build an interdisciplinary community of computational organismal biologists; develop modern storage and management tools for organismal data; and apply AI methods to datasets that are becoming too large and complex for conventional analysis. Compute will come from the NSF-supported National AI Research Resource and from Empire AI, a New York statewide consortium. NSF also frames the centre’s reliance on AI and existing data as supporting the Genesis Mission, which it describes as a coordinated national effort to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery.

NSCORE has the potential to catalyze creation of new knowledge in organismal biology via application of AI tools to existing data, as well as to change culture in organismal biology towards one of data sharing and data reuse.

Theresa Good, head of the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences

That second clause is the one most likely to land with working scientists. Anyone who has tried to locate and reuse a colleague’s twenty-year-old tagging or survey dataset knows why NSF considers a culture of data sharing worth funding directly, rather than assuming it will emerge on its own.

Why it matters for ocean conservation

Nothing in the NSF announcement singles out marine organisms. NSCORE’s remit is organismal biology in general, and its named partners lean towards natural history museums, a botanical garden and animal behaviour research. Still, the question the centre is built around is the one marine conservation keeps asking: which species, which populations and which individuals will cope with warming, acidification and shifting food webs, and what, if anything, can management do to change the odds.

If NSCORE’s tools make organismal datasets easier to find, standardise and reuse, marine biologists stand to benefit whether or not the centre ever adopts a marine flagship project. That will depend partly on who shows up. NSF says the centre will support open, collaborative science and will engage students and educators from primary school through university, which is an invitation the ocean community can choose to accept. A launch symposium on AI and organismal biology was scheduled at Columbia for 14 September 2026.

Source material: the NSF BIO announcement of 8 September 2026 and the Columbia University Arts and Sciences announcement. The interpretation of what the award may mean for marine science is SEVENSEAS Media’s own.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean