April 6, 2018
To unify its research efforts and strategic planning in computational biology and public health, PSC has launched a new Computational Biology Group. The senior director of the new group, Phil Blood, will oversee PSC’s Biomedical Applications and Public Health Applications Groups.
For over three decades, PSC has been a leader in enabling genomic research, multiscale biological modeling and connectomics (how the brain is wired) through its Biomedical Applications Group. Several years ago, PSC launched its Public Health Applications Group to empower public health decision making. PSC works closely with the life sciences community nationally and in Pittsburgh, particularly the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and projects that intersect machine learning and large-scale biomedical data.
“By bringing together our computational biology efforts in biomedical applications, public health and the broader life sciences, PSC will maximize its ability to capitalize on existing synergies, develop new collaborations, and further strengthen our ability to make significant impacts in these important fields,” Blood said.
Some active projects in the Computational Biology Group are the Anton 2 project and PSC’s participation in the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS), for which Blood is principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively. Through the Biomedical Applications Group, Comp Bio also brings together the Brain Archive, PSC’s participation in the National Center for Multiscale Modeling of Biological Systems (MMBioS) and extensive training activities. Through the Public Health Applications Group, Comp Bio factors agent-based modeling and statistics into PSC’s overall solutions through projects such as HERMES, RHEA, CLARA and Apollo.
“PSC has great depth in computational biology, and Pittsburgh is powerhouse for research in the life sciences,” observes Nick Nystrom, interim director of PSC. “Creating PSC’s Computational Biology Group recognizes this convergence and the incredible importance of computational biology research to improving our quality of life.”