From: "Hurt, Darrell (NIH/NIAID) [E]" <darrellh@niaid.nih.gov>
Subject: NIAID acquires Simple ITK
Date: January 18, 2019 at 6:13:07 AM PST
To: "Tom Ferrin (tef@cgl.ucsf.edu)" <tef@cgl.ucsf.edu>, "meng@cgl.ucsf.edu" <meng@cgl.ucsf.edu>, "'Scooter Morris'" <scooter@cgl.ucsf.edu>, "goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu" <goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Cc: "McCarthy, Meghan (NIH/NIAID) [C]" <meghan.mccarthy@nih.gov>

Hi Tom, Scooter, Elaine, and Tom,

I wanted to let you know that I’ve notified our contracting office of our intention to exercise our option to renew our contract with MSC for continued support at BCBB. This means that we will be able to use the same financial apparatus that we have been using for the next year or so as we continue working together on ChimeraX.

Also, I wanted to let you know that our group at NIAID has recruited Dave Chen, Ziv Yaniv, and Brad Lowekamp from the now-defunct Office of High-Performance Computing & Communications, formerly led by Terry Yoo at the Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine at NIH. Although they will be tasked with additional work now that they are at NIAID, it is my intention to have them continue development of Simple ITK and continue to make contributions to the ITK code base, which forms the heart of many medical imaging software packages, notably Slicer, which we have referenced as we’ve had discussions with Beth Ripley and others.

I am enthusiastic about the opportunities with Simple ITK and ITK, but I do not know the community very well. I am reaching out to get to know them better. But this acquisition of talent on our side means that we now have much greater capacity to collaborate in the development of volumetric visualization features in ChimeraX!

No action is requested at this time, but I wanted to keep you informed. Perhaps as I begin to connect the dots, we’ll have some kind of “summit” meeting for everyone involved.

Cheers,

Darrell

Darrell Hurt, Ph.D.
Chief, Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB)
OCICB/OSMO/OD/NIAID/NIH