Areas of Concentration

By design, the Computational Biology and Medicine Program is not focused on one area of computational biology. In fact, its faculty have a wide range of research interests, as listed below. Such diversity offers students in the program an excellent array of thesis laboratory opportunities. Specific faculty interests can be seen on the Faculty Roster page.

Biophysics and Structural Biology

• Analysis, modeling, and prediction of biomolecular structure and assembly
• Simulation of biomolecular function and mechanism
• Macromolecular interactions in subcellular targeting
• Protein folding and aggregation
• Protein-protein interaction partner discovery
• Structure-based drug design
• Membranes and membrane protein structure and function

Genomics and Bioinformatics -Bioinformatics of high throughput genomics and proteomics

• Biological data management, visualization, and analysis
• Identification and characterization of miRNAs -Databases and analysis of cell signaling pathways and gene regulation networks
• Structural bioinformatics

Modeling and Systems Biology

• Computational models in developmental biology
• Gene networks and gene regulation
• Cardiac dynamics
• Nonlinear dynamics in biological systems
• Immunology

Neuroscience

• Neurophysiology of the olfactory system
• Dynamical models of neural systems
• Temporal integration in neural systems
• Neurophysiology databases
• Visual information coding and processing

Cancer Biology

• Identifying cancer predisposition mutations
• Modeling of T-cell signaling
• Signal transduction networks
• Control of cell growth and death

Emerging and Specialized Areas

• Biologically inspired design
• Biomechanics
• Biomineralization
• Biostatistics
• Population genetics
• Imaging