Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce the appointment of Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Sohini Ramachandran as the Director of Brown’s Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB), effective immediately. Since January, Professor Ramachandran has been serving as Interim Director of CCMB, and has already begun implementing recommendations generated from a review conducted by an internal committee convened by my office with input from the Academic Priorities Committee.  

Established in 2003 as part of the Plan for Academic Enrichment (PAE), CCMB’s prime intellectual mission is to promote the development, implementation and application of quantitative methods to foundational questions in the biological and medical sciences. The research programs of CCMB’s core faculty lie fundamentally at the intersection of computer science, evolutionary biology, mathematics, molecular and cellular biology and medicine. Since its inception, CCMB has stimulated the recruitment of five faculty members to Brown, more than $40 million in grants, the continued growth of a vibrant undergraduate concentration started in the 1990s, and the establishment of a doctoral program. The CCMB core and associate faculty are also actively involved in the operation of Brown’s NIH-funded COBRE Center for the Computational Biology of Human Disease.

Research growth at Brown over the last 15 years has created new opportunities for CCMB. In particular, Brown’s Data Science Initiative (DSI) has both intellectual and structural overlap with CCMB. The research challenges at the heart of CCMB are a rich source of analytical andcomputational problems motivated by the complex nature of genomes, disease processes andevolutionary relationships. Because of the potential for significant intellectual synergies between CCMB and DSI, it was recommended by the internal committee that CCMB should become a core academic unit within DSI. This new configuration supplies DSI with a connection to the Division of Biology and Medicine, whose data sources will benefit from new methodological tools for analysis and will bring disease-related questions and personalized medicine squarely into the arena of DSI and CCMB. CCMB’s work on the genomic and molecular underpinnings of biological processes underlying various diseases also provides strong connections to Brown faculty in the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Warren Alpert Medical School and faculty in Brown’s clinical departments at our affiliated hospitals.

A member of the Brown community since 2010, Professor Ramachandran brings valuable scholarly experience to this new role, including having been one of the Center’s faculty recruits and serving as its Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her research in theoretical population genetics focuses on inferring the causes and predicting the consequences of human genomic variation via the development of novel statistical methods for analyzing genome sequences. She is also interested in enhancing methodology for identifying disease-associated genetic mutations such that results are applicable to diverse human populations and individuals of mixed-ancestry.

Prior to joining Brown, Professor Ramachandran was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her peer-reviewed publications have appeared in a range of journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Science, and Genetics. She is also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, and holds an R01 from the National Institutes of Health. She earned both her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences and her undergraduate degree in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford University.

I look forward to working with Professor Ramachandran in this critical role.

Sincerely,

Richard M. Locke
Provost