We are in the midst of a generational shift in research, and research funding opportunities, driven by new ‘disruptive’ technologies. The rapid emergence of a new world of science driven by very large scale data, next generation sensors, and advanced robotic instruments, in a host of disciplines from the environmental, physical and other sciences and engineering through public health and medicine, requires research universities to make a new set of high-level specialty faculty and technical skills and resources available to research endeavors and proposals in order for them to remain competitive. The University of Washington eScience Institute was formed in January 2008 by the Vice President for UW Technology and the Provost, in partnership with key Deans and a group of highly distinguished research faculty, to address these critical needs in UW’s characteristically entrepreneurial, highly leveraged, and interdisciplinary model. At the core, the eScience Institute is about expertise. Expertise in managing, analyzing or visualizing data, in developing algorithms, in managing clusters and storage resources, and in finding the right place to compute and to store your data. We provide access to expertise through a variety of channels.