About the Bioinformatics program

Our main goals are:

  • To provide integrated graduate training for biologists, computer scientists and mathematicians that will enable them to invent new kinds of bioinformatics throughout their future careers.
  • To create a strong, collaborative community of bioinformatics research groups at UCLA that unites faculty from many departments, and fosters leading-edge research in this highly interdisciplinary field. An excellent graduate program is a critical success factor for world-class research and for attracting superb faculty.
  • To make major contributions to bioinformatics research, through the development of new methodologies, new analyses of the human genome and other genomics data, and discoveries that directly affect human health.

Bioinformatics can be defined broadly as the study of the inherent structure of biological information. Some of this inherent structure is very obvious (e.g., statistical patterns that reveal crucial functional regions such as genes), while others are less obvious but still immediately fruitful (e.g., how regulatory sequences give rise to "programs" of gene expression), while others are profound long-term challenges (e.g., how the genome encodes the capabilities of the human mind). Bioinformatics is the marriage of biology and the information sciences. Long term, this is a huge intellectual project. Fortunately, it is producing immediately valuable results now, e.g.:

  • Statisticians have invented analyses of DNA microchip results (expression measurements of all 30,000 human genes simultaneously) that can distinguish different types of tumors with dramatically different treatment requirements, which previously were hard to differentiate clinically.
  • Evolutionary biologists have developed bioinformatics analyses of genome sequence data that reveal the precise pathways by which dangerous pathogens (like HIV) evolve drug resistance, and how to slow the evolution of multi-drug resistance.
  • Computer scientists have created powerful new ways for mapping brain functions automatically from standard imaging data.

Bioinformatics is of central importance to biomedical research in the 21st century (see Section 1-2 below), and to the economy of California. By training both Bioinformatics M.S. and Bioinformatics Ph.D. scientists from a variety of backgrounds, the proposed IDP will contribute directly to the skilled workforce that California's biotechnology and software companies require for success. The IDP's research may also give rise to new technologies and new companies. Indeed, many of the faculty have already done so in the past.

The proposed IDP will provide an academic home for bioinformatics at UCLA that will bring many different efforts together for the first time. Examples of current bioinformatics research conducted by the core faculty include:

  • The analysis of gene and protein sequences to reveal protein evolution and alternative splicing
  • The development of computational approaches to study and predict protein structure to further our understanding of function
  • The analysis of mass spectrometry data to, for example, understand the connection between phosphorylation and cancer
  • The development of computational methods to utilize expression data to reverse engineer gene networks in order to more completely model cellular biology
  • The study of population genetics and its connection to human disease

UCLA has already established a strong record of bioinformatics research and graduate training (see Section 1-2 below). In 1999 the faculty established a graduate core curriculum in bioinformatics, which has been offered continuously since that time (see Section 3-1a), demonstrating the faculty's commitment to collaborative teaching and to long-term development of an integrated bioinformatics program. These initiatives have been recognized by a large number of awards of multi-investigator Project and Training grants in bioinformatics from NIH, NSF, DOE and other funding sources. These many disparate efforts need a strong graduate program to make them cohesive, successful, and competitive in the long term.

The establishment of the Bioinformatics IDP will allow UCLA to overcome the limitations of the current situation, in which no single program brings together bioinformatics students. Specifically, we expect to resolve these existing weaknesses:

  • Prospective bioinformatics graduate students do not know which program to apply to at UCLA, since neither departmental graduate programs nor ACCESS specifically recruit and train them.
  • Graduate students at UCLA who are conducting bioinformatics research currently take diverse courses that do not necessarily cover the core training in bioinformatics that we believe they need and that we propose here.
  • Relative to other UC schools that already have established bioinformatics graduate programs (see Section 1-5 below), the lack of such a program at UCLA places UCLA at a disadvantage in competing for the top bioinformatics students, and this impacts the ability of our faculty to obtain funding in this area.

The creation of the Bioinformatics IDP at UCLA will allow us to overcome all of these limitations.