Welcome

Welcome to the 10th Anniversary of the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (DCMB) as a University of Michigan Medical School department. The growth and impact of our field, and some of our faculty and students many contributions will be highlighted today: looking at our history, current and future research, the success of our students and alums. We will explore some of our field’s future challenges with our keynote speaker, Dr. Holden Thorp and our faculty-led panel. We will get a chance to mingle, learn from one another, and be inspired.

The rise of Big Data, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence has transformed our field and will continue to drive its development and impacts. In addition to its quantitative and computational methods, co-mentorship, collaboration, and team science are what make our field and its practitioners special. We act as “translators” in many senses of the word. Our diverse faculty and trainees have contributed to the single cell multi-omics revolution in bioinformatics, moving far beyond functional genomics to leverage its epigenomics context. This provides the multi- scaler basis to more fully inform biological systems models to provide deeper insights and enable patient-specific personalized medicine.

Our many platforms are driving new discoveries in genomics, regulatory genomics, epigenomics, pharmacogenomics, and the 4D nucleome; protein structure, proteomics, and metabolomics; multi-omics based integrative bioinformatics, complex systems biology, and patient-specific clinical decision support; biomedical data science and translational bioinformatics of such complex diseases as Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancers, and psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders—exciting our sponsors and enabling novel industry partnerships.

Our students inspire their peers and the next generation with offerings ranging from “Girls Who Code” to the Bioinformatics Black Student Union (BBSU) (see list below). DCMB, the Bioinformatic Graduate Program, and our associated Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (CCMB) are their launch pad to exciting careers in industry, academia, and government. Establishing our new academic Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics 10 years ago is worthy of celebration now as we plan for the coming decade, soon to be in our U-M Regents-approved new facility. We are proud of our many remarkable students, alums, faculty, and collaborators. This field is “hot” and impactful,” and it is also great “FUN.”

Thanks for joining us!

Brian D. Athey, Ph.D.

Michael Savageau Collegiate Professor

Chair, Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics