A team of graduate students who work for the Institute for Economic Advancement in the UALR College of Business won the Windows Azure Award for a computer platform designed to make medical data available to researchers around the world, officials of Microsoft Inc.’s Imagine Contest announced Tuesday.

The national award, presented at Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Development Initiative National Finals, goes to the team that best utilizes the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

Mentored by Dr. James Parrish, assistant professor of management information systems, the Imagine Cup team, Team MedRx, includes Jenish Pahari, a native of Kathmandu, Nepal, who received her MBA in December; and Akheel Ahmed of Little Rock, Travis Bennett of Calico Rock, and Mujeeb Abdul of Hyderabad, India, from the UALR master’s computer science program.

Team MedRx’s submission is the Collaborative Unified Research Enhancement Database (CURED), which leverages the power and scalability of cloud computing to provide a platform that will provide medical researchers unprecedented access to research datasets from around the globe.

Cloud computing is the style of computing in which functionality is provided as a service over the Internet or an internal/external, location-transparent, centralized facility. Cloud computing attempts to provide access to the infrastructure as a utility service, resulting in decreased cost and increased agility. This style may represent the biggest paradigm shift in the delivery architecture of information services since the invention of timesharing or the introduction of the client/server network.

“By harnessing the power of global collaboration and combined datasets, CURED could literally change the face of medical research and findings around the world through the use of a technologically-supported brain trust never before tapped,” Parrish said.

Dr. Janet Bailey, associate professor of management, also helped prepare the team for the competition.

Parrish and Bailey coached eight College of Business teams in the Imagine Cup semi-finals last year – breaking the previous record of teams for a university in the semi-finals. It was the first year for UALR to compete in the worldwide contest.

In 2009, two of the College of Business teams qualified for spots in the national competition. The team of graduate management information systems students won second runner-up and was selected among five teams in the world to compete for the H.E. Susan Mubarak Special Award at the Software Design Initiative Finals in Cairo, Egypt.

“It is our most sincere hope that the lessons we learned during last year’s competition will help us reach even greater levels of success this year,” Parrish added.

Team MedRx joins two other UALR teams to compete in the U.S. Finals in Washington D.C., in April. The Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology had two teams, CDSS-AI – Artificial Intelligence-based Complex Decision Support System and Mogollar, among the five teams selected as Software Design U.S. Fall Finalists.

Now in its eighth year, the Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s largest competition attracting more than 200,000 students from more than 100 countries. Contests are conducted in categories including Software Design, Game Design, and Web Design.