Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease

The COBRE Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease embraces the age of genomics medicine from an explicitly data-driven, computational perspective. By building a collaborative Center of empirical and computational scientists, we advance new discoveries, algorithms, and genomic screening approaches with direct relevance to several human diseases. This is consistent with NIH's mission of supporting bioinformatics and computational biology to advance all areas of biomedicine.

Computational Biology Core Open Office Hours

The Computational Biology Core (CBC) has Open Office Hours for bioinformatic and computational consulting every Wednesday 1:30-3:30 pm in the Biomedical Center, Room 405 located at 171 Meeting Street. CBC staff is available to guide you with analyses of genomic-scale data sets such as RNA-, ChIP-, or ATAC-seq, genome/exome SNP calling, microbiome analyses, etc. Please complete the google form to help us manage staffing for the office hours. If you are not able to come during the scheduled office hours, please contact us at [email protected].

Computational Biology Core Services
Computational and Analytical Methodologies

The center will evolve a culture where computational expertise and biological research are blended within each research group, and not siloed into distinct collaborating teams.

Students and postdocs in Sohini Ramachandran’s lab are developing new computational and analytical methodologies to identify risk genes for leukemia that differ in incidence across ethnic groups and genders.
PEGASUS: the Precise, Efficient Gene Association Score Using SNPs

PEGASUS is a freely available software package, released by Nakka et al. (2016, Genetics), for combining SNP-level p-values into gene scores and conducting gene-level association tests with a phenotype of interest. PEGASUS computes gene scores of association analytically and produces gene scores with as much as 10 orders of magnitude higher numerical precision than competing methods.

Message from the Director

David Rand, PhD
Director of COBRE Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease
Co-Director of Computational Biology Core
Welcome to the Brown University COBRE Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease. We are grateful to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) for the support to establish this Center and allow us to build a computational biology infrastructure for the greater Brown and hospital environments that will benefit the study of human disease across all of Rhode Island. This Center provides a centralized service to assist researchers in computational, bioinformatic, and data management challenges of analyzing large data sets made available by modern "omics" technologies. In addition, this funding will support the research activities of junior investigators to ensure their transition to stand-alone extramurally funded research scientists. We use an innovative joint mentoring process, where each junior faculty member is advised by both computational and biological or clinical senior faculty members. In addition, staff in our Computational Biology Core will be active members of each of these laboratory groups to better integrate all phases of the research activities.