PI: David Rand, PhD
The Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease (CBHD) 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, the COBRE CBHD provides 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 are pursuing a human disease related project that requires some bioinformatic analyses to help them to obtain a more substantial peer-reviewed grant. We started our project with 5 junior faculty Project Leaders. Four of the original Project Leaders graduated by the end of year 3 with R01 awards, and a 5th Project Leader has recently been awarded a R01. We have recruited 4 new Project Leaders to replace those who have graduated. We have funded a total of 8 COBRE CBHD Institutional Pilot Awards since we started, 6 of whom have gone on to be funded either on this COBRE grant or on another COBRE grant in Rhode Island. Two current awardees were funded in January 2020, 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 Project Leaders and Pilot Awardees to help them achieve the required computational analysis for their projects. The CBC is producing standardized workflows for analyses and quality control for a variety of high throughput sequence data sets, as well as helping these faculty and their labs with more customized analysis tools. In addition, the CBC can offer advice on the experimental design to help ensure the researchers obtain the best possible data to achieve their research goals. The CBC also holds workshops periodically to help researchers and students to learn different computational tools, such as statistical analyses in R, or bioinformatic analyses such as those supported in the Bioconductor suite of analysis packages.