Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics

Driving innovation in computer science for innovation in biomedicine

Advances in biomedicine depend upon innovative approaches that are capable of recognizing complex associations in increasingly higher-dimensional data. Providing this innovation is the core task of bioinformatics. Previously understood as the computational branch of genetics and genomics, bioinformatics is fast becoming an overarching science of biomedical information processing. The Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics seeks to generate the intellectual and technical infrastructure required to integrate vastly diverse data types into models for the purpose of explaining biomedical processes from the molecular to the human scale and predicting future outcomes of process interventions from current observations.

The foundation of our Department’s research programs is mathematics and computer science. Within our own labs and in collaborations across campus, we also engage in the development of experiments that enable and amplify the explanatory and predictive power of our computational models. Our Department is therefore home to theoreticians and experimentalists alike, who share a passion for the scientific exploration of uncharted territory in biomedicine through mathematical formalism and computation. BioHPC, a world-class academic computing facility, is housed within our Department and employs a team of scientists dedicated to enabling computationally-driven research in the environment of a major academic medical center. In Spring 2021, the Department also integrated the Cecil H. and Ida Green Center for Systems Biology, which focuses on probing, modeling and programming of genetic and molecular circuits in cancer and bacteria.

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