The Ray and Stephanie Lane

Computational Biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

Department (CBD) is one of the seven departments within the School of Computer Science at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. Now situated in the Gates-Hillman Center, CBD was established in 2007 as the Lane Center for Computational Biology by founding department head Robert F. Murphy. The establishment was supported by funding from Raymond J. Lane and Stephanie Lane, CBD officially became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2009. In November 2023, Carnegie Mellon named the department as the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, in recognition of the Lanes' significant investment in computational biology at CMU. CBD specializes in

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...

systems biology Systems biology is the computational modeling, computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological system ...

, and

biological imaging Biological imaging may refer to any imaging technique used in biology. Typical examples include: * Bioluminescence imaging, a technique for studying laboratory animals using luminescent protein * Calcium imaging, determining the calcium status of ...

, pioneering advanced computational methods, including AI and machine learning. The accolades of its faculty (current and former) include leadership roles such as president of the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

and the International Society of Advanced Cytometry, and as membership in the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

Council of Councils. They have received numerous prestigious awards, including the

Overton Prize The ISCB Overton Prize is a computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biolog ...

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

, Okawa Award,

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

Young Investigator Award,

Presidential Young Investigator Award The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Preside ...

NSF CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER award is the most prestigious award presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States Federal Government to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through rese ...

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

, and New Innovator's Award from the NIH, among others. Additionally, faculty members have been elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

, and the International Society of Computational Biology. As part of the HHMI-NIBIB Interfaces Initiative, CBD received funding from

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

and the

National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), founded at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2000, is located in Bethesda, Maryland, Bethesda, Maryland. It is one of 27 institutes and centers that are part of NIH, ...

(NIBIB) to develop an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

with the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

, which was founded as the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology in 2005. This program is currently receiving training support through a National Institutes of Health T32 Training Grant. CBD is the home of the B.S. in Computational Biology, one of the four B.S. degree programs within

Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a degree-granting school for computer science established in 1988, making it one of the first of its kind in the world. It has been consistently ra ...

. The Computational Biology undergraduate program has been consistently ranked as one of the top 3 programs by US News. CBD is the home of an NIH Center for the HuBMAP Integration, Visualization & Engaging (HIVE) Initiative led by Ziv Bar-Joseph and an NIH Center for Multiscale Analysis of 4D Nucleome Structure and Function by Comprehensive Multimodal Data Integration led by Jian Ma. CBD houses the Center for AI-Driven Biomedical Research (AI4BIO) at CMU, a catalyst for innovations at the intersection of AI and biomedicine across the School of Computer Science and campus.

Notable faculty

* Robert F. Murphy (founding department head) * Russell Schwartz (current department head) * Ziv Bar-Joseph *

Jaime Carbonell Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resul ...

* Jian Ma * Kathryn Roeder *

Roni Rosenfeld Roni Rosenfeld (Hebrew: רוני רוזנפלד) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and computational epidemiologist, currently serving as the head of thMachine Learning Departmentat Carnegie Mellon University. He is an international exper ...

* Eric Xing

Degree programs

* Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology (with

) * M.S. in Computational Biology (joint with the Department of Biological Sciences) * M.S. in Automated Science * B.S. in Computational Biology * Minor in Computational Biology

References

{{Carnegie Mellon, state=uncollapsed Medical imaging research institutes Schools and departments of Carnegie Mellon University departments in the United States Bioinformatics organizations Organizations established in 2007 2007 establishments in Pennsylvania