Computational biology involves the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, ecological, behavioral, and social systems. The field is broadly defined and includes foundations in biology, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, computer science and evolution.
Stanford University School of Medicine is the medical school of Stanford University and is located in Stanford, California. It is the successor to the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, founded in San Francisco in 1858. The school ceased operations in 1862, but was later in 1870 refounded by Levi Cooper Lane and renamed Cooper Medical College; the medical school was acquired by Stanford in 1908. The medical school moved to the Stanford campus near Palo Alto, California in 1959.
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
The University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) is one of five campuses of the University of Massachusetts (UMass) system. It is home to three schools: the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Graduate School of Nursing, as well as a biomedical research enterprise and a range of public-service initiatives throughout the state. One of the fastest-growing academic health centers in the country, UMMS is located in Worcester, Massachusetts; other UMass sites are located in Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell. UMMS is also known as UMass Worcester.
Scripps Research, previously known as The Scripps Research Institute is a nonprofit American medical research facility that focuses on research and education in the biomedical sciences. Headquartered in San Diego, California with a sister facility in Jupiter, Florida, the institute has 250 laboratories employing 2,400 scientists, technicians, graduate students, and administrative and other staff, making it the largest private, non-profit biomedical research organization in the United States and among the largest in the world.
Joseph Leonard Goldstein is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.
Robert Samuel Langer, Jr. FREng is an American chemical engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and one of the 10 Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Huntington Faxon Willard is an American geneticist. In 2014, he was named to head the Marine Biological Laboratory, and a professor in human genetics at the University of Chicago. He stepped down from leading the lab in 2017 to return to research. Willard was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2016. Earlier, beginning in 2003 he was the Nanaline H. Duke Professor of Genome Sciences, the first Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Vice Chancellor for Genome Sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. As of 2015, he is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. As of March 2017, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
Chi-Huey Wong is a Taiwanese-born American biochemist. He is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. His expertise is bioorganic and synthetic chemistry, especially in carbohydrate chemistry and chemical biology.
Biological engineering, or bioengineering/bio-engineering, is the application of principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable, tangible, economically viable products. Biological engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number of pure and applied sciences, such as mass and heat transfer, kinetics, biocatalysts, biomechanics, bioinformatics, separation and purification processes, bioreactor design, surface science, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and polymer science. It is used in the design of medical devices, diagnostic equipment, biocompatible materials, renewable bioenergy, ecological engineering, agricultural engineering, and other areas that improve the living standards of societies. Examples of bioengineering research include bacteria engineered to produce chemicals, new medical imaging technology, portable and rapid disease diagnostic devices, prosthetics, biopharmaceuticals, and tissue-engineered organs. Bioengineering overlaps substantially with biotechnology and the biomedical sciences in a way analogous to how various other forms of engineering and technology relate to various other sciences.
Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, United States.
Jonas Edward Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. Born in New York City, he attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine, later choosing to do medical research instead of becoming a practicing physician. In 1939, after earning his medical degree, Salk began an internship as a physician scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Two years later he was granted a fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he would study flu viruses with his mentor Thomas Francis, Jr.
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is the D. H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He earned his AB in biochemical sciences from Harvard University and his MD/PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University in 1998, and completed medical internship and psychiatry residency at Stanford Medical School. He is known for creating and developing the technologies of CLARITY and optogenetics, and for applying integrated optical and genetic strategies to study normal neural circuit function as well as dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease. He has led his laboratory at Stanford University since 2004, serves as an attending physician at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and has been affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 2009. Since 2014 he is a foreign Adjunct Professor at Sweden's prestigious Karolinska medical institute.
David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist, professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, specializing in breast cancer surgery. He is an outspoken skeptic. He is also a critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. He is the author of a blog, Respectful Insolence, and is the managing editor of the website Science-Based Medicine.
Julio Licinio is currently Senior Vice President for Academic and Health Affairs, as well as Executive Dean, Dean of the College of Medicine, and Professor in Departments of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Medicine at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. He was formerly deputy director at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, where he was head of the Mind & Brain Theme. He was simultaneously Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Flinders University in Adelaide, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, adjunct professor of psychiatry at the UT Health Science Center at Houston, and visiting professor of psychiatry, University of Minho in Braga. He is the former director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, where he founded the John Curtin Medical Research Foundation. Licinio is the founding and current chief editor of three journals from Springer Nature, namely Molecular Psychiatry, Translational Psychiatry, and The Pharmacogenomics Journal.
Graham Johnson is an animator, illustrator and, beginning in 2012, faculty fellow at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. He has a master's degree in medical illustration from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in biophysics from Scripps. After graduating from Johns Hopkins and while working at the Salk Institute, he illustrated the textbook Cell Biology.
Mauro Ferrari is a nanoscientist known for leadership in founding the field of nanomedicine and serving as special expert on nanotechnology for the National Cancer Institute (2003-2005) where he was instrumental in establishing the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer in 2004.
