“With this funding we were able to attract a very large number of applicants from a wide range of disciplines: top students with high test scores, GPAs and recommendations.”

Robert F. Murphy, Ph.D.
Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering;
Received support from the DSF Charitable Foundation, the charitable-giving organization of the David Scaife family

In 2004, the DSF Charitable Foundation gave Carnegie Mellon seed support to help launch a new Ph.D. program in computational biology. One of the hallmarks of the program, a collaborative effort with the University of Pittsburgh, is that it provides very intensive training in both biology and computational science. The result is that it positions students to become leaders in the frontiers of biological research and to identify those kinds of problems that can be solved computationally.

As Professor Robert Murphy explains, the focus of the program is on “training students for a new paradigm of how biological research is done; to not focus on a particular disease, problem or cell, but to really understand how a system works as a whole.”

The potential impact of this approach is enormous, he says, because it is going to be critical in the coming wave of personalized medicine to understand from somebody’s genetic makeup and other tests the kinds of problems that might arise for that particular person.

“The complexity of the interactions of all of these things argues for the need for a more comprehensive understanding, and that, of necessity, has to have a very large computational component to it,” says Dr. Murphy.

The funding from DSF Charitable Foundation came at an important time. “We were able to attract a very large number of applicants from a wide range of disciplines: top students with high test scores, GPAs and recommendations,” he says. The vast majority of the foundation’s support goes directly toward paying stipends and tuition for first-year students in the program. “The program has been very well received,” says Dr. Murphy.

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