About CBCB
The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) brings together researchers from many disciplines, including computer science, molecular biology, genomics, genetics, mathematics, statistics, and health computing, all of whom aspire to gain a better understanding of how life works.
Research
Our faculty, joined by talented graduate students and postdocs, perform research in a broad set of scientific areas related to the use of computational methods for new discoveries in the life sciences. This includes pathogen genomics, microbiome research, epigenetics, molecular evolution, transcriptional regulation, metabolic modeling, proteomics, and more.
Underlying these activities is a strong focus on fundamental computational research in statistics and machine learning, string algorithms, graph theory, and combinatorial optimization.
Education
CBCB currently supports more than __?__ graduate students, most at the Ph.D. level, as well as several postdoctoral scholars. Our diverse academic community allows our students to collaborate across disciplines—machine learning researchers working with data scientists and epidemiologists, or computational biologists working with entomologists, are but two examples.
CBCB is also active in the National Science Foundation-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, exposing visiting undergraduates to interdisciplinary training needed to process and analyze large scale genomic datasets.
All these activities are supported by robust computational resources and a stellar technical staff that is unparalleled on the UMD campus.
Location
The University of Maryland is the flagship campus of the state’s higher education system and a top-ranked public research university. Our advantageous location—just outside of Washington, D.C.—is a short commute to numerous federal agencies and research labs, giving our faculty and graduate students the opportunity to interact with government experts at the National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Food and Drug Administration, and more.
CBCB faculty and graduate students also collaborate with physicians and clinicians at the nearby University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Facilities
In 2019, CBCB moved into the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, a stunning 215,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility that encourages research, collaboration and innovation. The building allows our faculty—whether they’re computer scientists, biologists or microbiologists—to easily collaborate with other faculty involved in data science, linguistics, engineering, cybersecurity, and other areas based in computing.
Some of our faculty maintain secure wet labs in other building on campus, allowing for cutting-edge research in host-pathogen interaction, microbiome sciences, and more.
