A few people have requested a summary of the replies I received, so here it is.
Again, thanks for all the information:
RUTGERS & KECK CENTERS:
My graduate school, Rutgers University, has a very good program in
Molecular Biophysics, which definitely welcomes computational
approaches. There is a LARGE community of computer-toting biologists,
chemists, etc, not to mention several computer scientists who
specialize in biological applications. I think the person heading the
Mol. Biophysics training program is Prof. Wilma Olson, Dep't of
Chemistry, Busch Campus, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854.
My current program, the Keck Center for Advanced Training in
Computational Biology at the University of Pittsburgh is also such a
center. Unfortunately, I think our funding is running out, so we may
or may not continue as a center here. However, there are other
similar Keck Centers, at Texas A&M, Rice, UC San Francisco, etc. with
the same mission. So you might check them out. You can check out
our home page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jarzynka/keck/
Also, there is a training program here on Medical Informatics.
You can check out the home page at http://www.smi.med.pitt.edu
Again, there is a large community of people here interested in
applications of computer science in biomedicine.
PENN:
http://cbil.humgen.upenn.edu/~dsearls/NSF.html
The Penn Computational Biology Training Program
The University of Pennsylvania has initiated an interdisciplinary training
program in Computational Biology, funded by the National Science Foundatio
n,
with research focusing on applications of computer science, mathematics, a
nd
statistics to molecular genetics. This program will accept students into t
he
standard PhD programs of either the Computer and Information Science
department, or a biological department, but will then provide additional
training in the complementary discipline. Postdoctoral fellows will also b
e
funded, who have demonstrated interdisciplinary research interests.
Particular areas of interest include physical and genetic mapping,
biological databases, multiple sequence alignment, phylogeny construction,
sequence search and analysis, statistical methods, and discrete algorithms
and combinatorial optimization in biology.
Potential applicants may contact any of the following:
* Dr. Warren Ewens, PI, Department of Biology (wewens at mail.sas.upenn.edu)
* Dr. David Roos, co-PI, Department of Biology (droos at mail.sas.upenn.edu)
* Dr. David Searls, co-PI, Department of Genetics
(dsearls at cbil.humgen.upenn.edu)
*Dr. Tandy Warnow, co-PI, Department of Computer and Information Science
(tandy at central.cis.upenn.edu
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Seminars:
* October 28, 1994, Dr. Michael Waterman, "The Statistical Significance
of Biological Sequence Database Comparisons" (abstract) (PostScript)
* November 4 and 7, 1994, Dr. David Searls, "The Computational
Linguistics of Biological Sequences" (abstract)
* February 9, 1995, Dr. Simon Tavare, "Estimating the Mutation Rate of
the Human Mitochondrial DNA Deletion mtDNA^4977" (abstract)
(PostScript)
* March 3, 1995, Dr. Craig Benham, "Computational Methods to Analyze
Stressed DNA" (PostScript)
* April 25, 1995, Dr. Richard Lipton, "Using DNA to Compute"
(PostScript)
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Faculty and their research interests:
* Dr. Peter Buneman (Computer and Information Science): Programming
languages: applicative and functional languages, type systems,
implementation techniques, semantics.
* Dr. Fang Chung (Mathematics): Combinatorics and algorithms.
* Dr. Susan Davidson (Computer and Information Science): Real-time
systems: language support and formal methods for distributed real-time
programs, real-time database systems.
* Dr. Joe Ecker (Biology): Biochemical mechanisms underlying the
perception and transduction of plant hormone signals.
* Dr. Warren Ewens (Biology): Mathematical biology, population genetics.
* Dr. Ellis Golub (Biochemistry, Dental School): The relationship
between protein sequence, protein structure and protein function.
* Dr. Greg Guild (Biology): Sequential activation of ecdysone-regulated
genes in metamorphic development of Drosophila, and the subsequent
cascade of transcriptional regulation.
* Dr. Aravind Joshi (Computer and Information Science): Problems that
overlap computer science and linguistics.
* Dr. Sampath Kannan (Computer and Information Science): Algorithms in
computational biology, complexity theory, randomization and
computation.
* Dr. Haig Kazazian (Genetics): The analysis of mutational mechanisms in
humans.
* Dr. Steve Liebhaber (Genetics): DNA structure-function relationships.
* Dr. Max Mintz (Computer and Information Science): Decision making
under uncertainty.
* Dr. Chris Overton (Genetics): Genome informatics, biological databases.
* Dr. David Roos (Biology): Molecular genetics and cell biology of
protozoan parasites, host-pathogen interactions, eukaryotic evolution.
* Dr. David Searls (Genetics): Linguistics of biological sequences,
genome informatics.
* Dr. Neil Shubin (Biology): Evolution of developmental patterns;
origins of the vertebrate limb; Comparative molecular and
paleontological phylogenies.
* Dr. Eero Simoncelli (Computer and Information Science): Representation
and analysis of visual imagery: development of a theory of distributed
parallel representation and computation.
* Dr. Rich Spielman (Genetics): Genetics of susceptibility to so-called
complex human diseases.
* Dr. Chris Stoeckert (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia):
Understanding the regulation of fetal and adult globin genes in human
adults.
* Dr. Santosh Venkatesh (Electrical Engineering): Computational learning
theory.
* Dr. Tandy Warnow (Computer and Information Science): Combinatorial and
graph-theoretic algorithms for computational biology, evolutionary tree
construction methods.
U. OF GEORGIA :
We have a fairly strong program in Computational Biology.
You can write to
Graduate Coordinator
Genetics Department
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
Graduate Coordinator
Computer Science
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
U. OF ILLINOIS
I'm in the 'division of Biophysics and Computational Biology' at Univ. of
Illinois in Urbana. Because of the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here and tons
of computational power at your fingertips, as it were.
WASHINGTON U.
Relatively few formal graduate programs exist for computational
biology. This is surely going to change rapidly over the next few
years.
At this point, my advice would be to read computational biology
literature, note where the work is being done that interests you, and
apply to those schools.
For instance, here at Washington University, there is no graduate
program in computational biology. However, there is a major genome
center here and an active group of several researchers who are mostly
or exclusively computational, and these research groups happily take
graduate students. Our students come through the normal university
programs, such as molecular genetics. The situation is similar at
U. Colorado at Boulder, where I did my thesis work; computational
biology grad students apply to the normal molecular, cellular,
developmental biology program and join a computational group when they
choose their thesis lab.
Princton Ecol. & Evol. - no further information
INTERNET RESOURCES:
SMBnet
SMBnet is an electronic mail and anonymous ftp facility with which
members of the mathematical biology community can communicate readily.
It is being operated through the auspices of the Society for
Mathematical Biology with the support of the Advanced Scientific
Computing Laboratory of the National Cancer Institute.
URL: gopher://gopher.nih.gov/11/res/SMBdigest.
To subscribe/unsubscribe to/from the SMB Digest:
Send mail to LISTSERV at fconvx.ncifcrf.gov with
"subscribe SMBnet <your-personal-name>" or "unsubscribe SMBnet" in the
body of the mail.
For example, to subscribe Ignatius Nobel from a UNIX system:
echo "subscribe SMBnet Ignatius Nobel" | mail LISTSERV at fconvx.ncifcrf
.gov
MISC.:
There are no formal programs in computational biology that I am aware of.
You may want to contact G. SIngh @ the Center for Genome Resources regardi
ng
postdoc positions are places where you may receive formal training.
--
__ ___
/ )_ _ /__)_ _ /_ / ! dredd+ at osu.edu
/__/(_)(_/(_/ / )(-(_/(_/ ! "Reality is nothing but a story
_) ! written in a book of madness."
