The Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease was started in June 2016 with funding provided by a Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Institutional Development Award (IDeA) grant P20GM109035 provided by the National Institute of General Medical Science.  One of the goals of the Center is to provide support and mentorship to junior investigators who are doing research in areas of human disease that require significant computational analysis of 'omics data.  In addition, we also provide the COBRE CBHD Institutional Pilot Awards to two junior investigators each year that may also be good candidates for a future research project on the grant, or who may just need to complete a small one-year human disease related project that requires some data analysis to help them to obtain a more substantial peer-reviewed grant.  We started our project with 5 project leaders of 5 research projects.  Four of the original projects have graduated as of 2/28/19, with more substantial grants of their own, and we have recently recruited 4 new projects.  We have funded a total of 6 COBRE CBHD Institutional Pilot Awards since we started, four of whom have gone on to be funded as a research project either on this COBRE grant or on another COBRE grant in Rhode Island.  The other two were awarded in January 2019, and we look forward to working with them to help them achieve their research goals.  

In addition, the Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease has created the Computational Biology Core (CBC).  The CBC works with the research project  and pilot award leads to help them achieve the required computational analysis for their projects.  They create some standard pipelines like for quality control and RNA Seq analysis as well as helping the project leads and their labs with some more customized analysis tools.  In addition, they can make suggestions on the experimental design to help ensure the researchers obtain the best possible data to achieve their research goals.   The CBC also has workshops periodically to help researchers and students to learn different points of analysis.  One of the more popular workshops has been the Introduction to R workshop.  

The Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease, the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, and the Data Science Initiative share a seminar series that is presented on most Wednesdays during the semester at 4 p.m. at 164 Angell Street on the third floor.  Please see our events page for upcoming events.