Best Graduate Programs in Computational Biology?

Graduate School
1

<p>I’m planning on applying to graduate school this coming fall and am trying to come up with a list of schools based on solid Computational Biology graduate programs. </p>

<p>I did a summer internship at Pitt which has one of the earliest established departments in CompBio (started in 2001) as well as a joint graduate degree program with Carnegie Mellon. </p>

<p>Any other graduate programs that I could apply to? </p>

<p>I’m a Bio and Applied Mathematics double major. I am most interested in Computational Genomics, so I get to stay in a wet lab, protein structures never seemed that interesting and cubicles don’t sit well with me :)</p>

2

<p>Computational Biology is a field that is a little bit tricky to apply to, because many universities that do have strong computational Biology research do not have a designated program, or it goes under a different name such as Bioinformatics. In Berkeley, for instance, there is a lot of very exciting compBio research going on, but there is only a “designated emphasis” on computational Biology you may acquire, and your degree will be in a related field, like integrative biology, statistics or computer science. </p>

<p>Depending on what exactly you’d like to to, some other universities I’d check out are the Broad Institute (i.e Harvard/MIT), Stanford, University of Chicago and University of Washington, possibly also UCLA.</p>

3

<p>UCSF has also been popular with my friends in computational/systems biology.</p>

4

<p>UC Santa Cruz also has a [comp</a> bio/bioinformatics department](<a href=“Baskin School of Engineering – Baskin Engineering provides unique educational opportunities, world-class research with an eye to social responsibility and diversity.”>Baskin School of Engineering – Baskin Engineering provides unique educational opportunities, world-class research with an eye to social responsibility and diversity.). It’s a smallish department but UCSC is the host of the Human Genome Browser and was one of the driving forces behind the public project (Dean Sinsheimer suggested it and one of the grad students at the time, Jim Kent, is the guy who put together all the pieces and coded the browser). There’s some big names there too, Hausssler, Green, Lowe, Berman. </p>

<p>Most of those guys run wet labs as well, it’s not just compiling code or running BLAST searches all day.</p>