Program Details
Computational Biology (CB) at Cornell is an interdisciplinary program that links the computational and mathematical sciences with the life sciences.
Quantitative prediction and interpretation are becoming increasingly essential components of biology and other fields. Complex patterns, structures and interactions raise fundamental and fascinating questions that can only be addressed using formal mathematical, statistical, and computational methods. The wealth of data being acquired to address these questions requires new and substantive quantitative approaches to make possible appropriate analysis and interpretation. The unprecedented level of computational power now available to researchers provides the means for increasingly sophisticated analyses of highly complex systems arising in the biological sciences.
Many biologists are faced with the task of analyzing and modeling data collected in the lab, in the field, or in silico that requires sophisticated mathematical and computational analysis. Traditional statistical methods are limited in their scope and are proving inadequate for the complex models and massive data sets that are now becoming commonplace. The solutions to these large-scale problems often lie at the interface of mathematics, computer science and statistics and a new type of scientist and academic who can work and communicate across the inter-disciplinary barriers is needed.
The Computational Biology faculty come from 16 departments in a spectrum of endowed and contract colleges, including the Weill Cornell Medical College. As might be expected, these faculty also represent the related fields such as Computer Science, Biophysics, Applied Mathematics, Genetics, Genomics, and Development, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Biometry.