Dear colleagues,
As some of you know, our NIH funding support to the MCX/MMC project (http://mcx.space) will be
ending in Apr. 2020. We are currently preparing a competitive renewal application, seeking the opportunity to continue serving our large user group.
I am writing to you today to ask for your help in preparing this application. Specifically, I would like you to share a
short testimonial regarding how our MC tools had helped you research and why you believe continuing MCX/MMC development and user support is important for your future projects. Your support is crucial in showing our funding agency the broad impact that
the MCX project has already brought to the community, and demonstrating the potential future impact as well.
Please use the below Google form link to submit your testimonials/comments, it will only take a few minutes of your time.
https://goo.gl/forms/kZfipKZFeJADBulk1
It has been our great pleasure to watch the steady growth of the MCX user community since the initial funding started in 2015. As of today, we have
quadrupled the total number of registered users from ~500 in 2015 to over 2,000 (unique emails), and the number of citations has also quadrupled from ~250 to ~950; in addition, via our mailing lists with hundreds of active subscribers, we have provided
timely support to our users in a wide range of applications. Since 2017, we have organized 3 training workshops and hosted over 90 participants. The MCX software has also grown tremendously with many new features, faster speed, more hardware/platform support
and rich set of examples/documentations.
In our new development cycle, we will continue spearheading the innovations in fast, accurate and versatile MC light transport modeling; a number of new approaches may further accelerate MC simulations by another order of magnitude. We also secured the support from AMD to optimize our codes for the new ROCm platform and the upcoming GPU architectures. In the meantime, we will specifically address the feedback from our workshop participants, and make significant efforts in improving the usability, stability and GUI-/web based interfaces, pre-/post analysis features, and broad disseminations via app stores/repositories. The new funding period will provide the opportunity to make MCX a mature, full featured, thoroughly validated, and easy-to-access platform for all biomedical optics researchers/companies.
Please help us to achieve this goal! if you are a PI and consider MCX an important tool for your projects, please consider writing a full (1-2 page) support letter. Please email me and I will be happy to provide a template. I would like you to submit your feedback before Sep 1st (in 1 week), so that we can put this into our proposal. Ideally, I would like to gather 50 testimonials and ~10 support letters.
Thank you so much! Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Qianqian