Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program with integrated one-year core curriculum, over 50 elective courses, and over 20 core bioinformatics faculty spanning life & physical sciences, the Medical School and Engineering School. [Learn more about the program and research]
News and Upcoming Events
New Research Talk Videos Online
We've added new videos presenting faculty research online, for example new talks from James Lake (on an exciting new hypothesis for early prokaryotic evolution), John Novembre (on population genomics studies in human populations and in canid populations), Sebastien Roch (on his recent work in mathematical phylogenetics), and Marc Suchard (on high performance phylogeny methods). [more] (posted Wednesday, July 28, 2010)Sebastien Roch’s work on phylogenetic reconstruction from pairwise distances published in Science
Pairwise distance methods, while far faster computationally, have long been assumed to be inferior to likelihood based methods such as maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference. Sebastien Roch has shown mathematically the surprising result that pairwise distance matrices can in fact capture all the information used by likelihood methods to reconstruct the optimal tree, and has presented an algorithm implementing this insight that can perform as well as likelihood methods. This work was recently published in Science. [more] (posted Thursday, July 1, 2010)Nelson lab completes genomic sequencing of brain cancer cell line
Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have performed the first complete genomic sequencing of a brain cancer cell line, an advance that could lead to personalized treatments based on the unique biological signature of an individual's cancer and that may unveil new molecular targets for which more effective and less toxic drugs can be developed. [more] (posted Wednesday, June 30, 2010)James Liao receives Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award
James C. Liao, the Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been awarded the 2010 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Liao, the first UCLA professor to receive the award in its 15-year history, is being recognized for his groundbreaking work recycling carbon dioxide for the biosynthesis of higher alcohols. This process turns CO2 — a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels — into products that can be used in alternative transportation fuels or chemical feedstock, reducing greenhouse emissions and providing for cleaner, greener energy worldwide. [more] (posted Wednesday, June 30, 2010)View the News Archive