The Discovery Team Final Report outlines an ambitious roadmap for future development of the University that embraces multidisciplinary research and education as a core principle. CIMS is a critical factor in the successful pursuit of the goals of this plan.

A critical challenge facing the university as it seeks to build national research leadership is to create and organize the mathematical and statistical expertise that is required. Indeed, we are competing with leading universities that are already developing formal institutional mechanisms for encouraging and supporting interdisciplinary mathematics and statistics. The increasing importance of the mathematical and statistical components in modern science and engineering is documented in numerous blue ribbon reports by professional scientific and engineering bodies as well as national funding trends. The importance of the existing partnerships between mathematicians and statisticians with engineers and scientists at Colorado State University is demonstrated by the list of projects initiated by CIMS faculty.

Achieving the goals set out in the Discovery Team Final Report requires an enormous investment in the development of new research expertise on campus. This will require hiring many new researchers oriented towards interdisciplinary projects, who must be brought into an environment conducive to interdisciplinary research if they are to be successful. It also requires encouraging current faculty to engage in new interdisciplinary research to whatever extent is possible. CIMS will be very useful in both regards.

CIMS is specifically designed to meet the future needs of the university in terms of interdisciplinary mathematics and statistics. CIMS provides a "clearinghouse" where scientists and engineers can solicit for desired partnerships with mathematicians and statisticians. CIMS has the expertise needed to investigate and formulate the mathematical and statistical components of scientific and engineering research and can provide links to faculty with the necessary skills. At the same time, CIMS provides incentive and support to faculty to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations. In cases in which the required expertise is not available on campus, CIMS can provide clear guidelines for future hiring as well as brokering contacts with mathematicians and statisticians in other universities.

We contend that any large, interdisciplinary research groups in engineering and the sciences, including the established and proposed superclusters, will have needs for collaborations with mathematicians and statisticians. For example, CIMS activities can potentially impact the infectious diseases supercluster (PRIMES introductory TREE course introduces PRIMES students to team-based research using infectious disease models, CIMS has supported submission of two proposals in animal infectious disease, and one of the training themes of FEScUE is modeling infectious diseases).