About the Center

What is Computational Biology?

One of the greatest challenges facing researchers in the biological sciences today is to understand the operation of complex biological systems. By systems, we mean large groups of interacting elements, whether those elements are substrates in a biochemical pathway, individual nerve cells in the brain, or animals in an entire ecosystem. In the case of the human brain, we will never understand the basis of emotion or consciousness unless we understand how billions of nerve cells interact and function as a system. In the case of complex ecosystems, a systems-level understanding will be necessary if we are to preserve and exploit those systems in a sustainable manner.

The extreme complexity of many systems precludes a "paper and pencil" approach toward system description and analysis. Researchers are becoming ever more aware of the necessity of integrating sophisticated computer analyses into their studies. Computers have been elevated to become central, enabling research tools for discovery of the mechanisms underlying complex biological phenomena. This transformation is being brought about by the development and application of sophisticated database and network simulation tools. Such tools allow researchers to formalize their hypotheses into quantitative, interactive models of the systems under study. These models facilitate the testing of their hypotheses and the derivation of additional predictive experiments.

The maturation of this computational approach has been accelerated by development of productive partnerships between experimentalists, theoreticians and engineers having similar interests but very different (and complementary) areas of expertise. This multidisciplinary computational approach to basic and applied research problems is defined as computational biology. In this sense, computational biology cannot be thought of as an independent field of study (like microbiology or genetics). Rather, it is a general approach toward the solution of scientific problems through which advanced computational techniques are used to discover the hidden order in complex data sets and to decipher the languages of biology.

What is the Center for Computational Biology?

The Center for Computational Biology (CCB) is an interdisciplinary unit supporting research and education in the general area of Computational Biology through the combined use of advanced experimental, theoretical and computational approaches.

How does the mind emerge from the brain? How does human culture emerge and evolve through interactions between individual minds? Over the last twenty years there has been an explosion in our knowledge about the structure and function of components of our nervous system, from the details of the molecular mechanics of single ion channels to the functional organization of large neural networks. However, progress in neuroscience is faltering in the face of the larger, more fundamental questions relating to brain, mind, and behavior. The greatest challenges in neuroscience are to understand the organization, development and operation of neural systems at levels of complexity that far surpass our current "component-level" knowledge. Faculty associated with the CCB are focusing their research toward meeting these system-level challenges. Rather than restricting their research to a particular level of organization (e.g., the molecular, the cellular,the network or the cognitive level), researchers in the CCB integrate across several levels. Moreover, the research being pursued in the CCB is intrinsically multidisciplinary, involving neurobiologists, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, engineers and clinicians. Research projects focus on the interaction of components within the systems under study, on the mechanistic basis for those interactions, on the phenomena that emerge from those interactions. The ultimate goal of the Center is to foster and focus research into the mechanistic basis of perception and cognition. This will be accomplished through the support of basic research, through the support of meaningful scientific discourse between researchers having diverse backgrounds and differing points of view, and through the education of the larger scientific community about the results of this research and discourse.

The core goals of the CCB are:

• to provide a constructive intellectual environment that rewards collaborationbetween students and researchers in diverse fields, which will be essential for taking the next major steps toward understanding the operation of complex biological systems;
• to provide a world-class user facility for integrating experimental, computational and theoretical research;
• to provide students and faculty the opportunity to establish partnerships with colleagues at many different institutions around the world, unfettered by the constraints usually imposed by physical isolation;
• to apply these resources toward the advancement of knowledge about the relationships between the brain, the mind and human understanding of the self, within a larger cultural and biological context.

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