Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCBio)

The Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCBio) is a partnership between the UCLA College, the Health Sciences, and Engineering. Its associated faculty span more than twelve departments, and a broad range of biological and biomedical research areas. QCBio faculty and their laboratories are committed to quantitative reasoning and the development of algorithmic and computational methods.

QCBio’s mission is to support quantitative and computational biosciences research, training, and education. As new measurement capabilities and public data bases are rendering the biosciences – whether basic, translational or clinical – increasingly data-rich, the challenges and opportunities for data analysis and interpretation are a hallmark of all aspects of biosciences research. Further, vast quantities of knowledge – the result of prior research investments – should be harnessed for computer-aided data interpretation and prospective prediction. Thus QCBio addresses the opportunities and challenges of data-driven and knowledge-based computational modeling in the biosciences.

QCBio fosters research into the development of algorithms, software, statistical, mechanistic, and dynamical models, as well as intra-institutional and international collaborations. QCBio provides research training and expert collaborative support via the Collaboratory. QCBio functions as the academic home and sponsor of the inter-departmental programs in Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics, and Computational and Systems Biology, at the graduate and undergraduate level. QCBio organizes a major summer undergraduate research program, Bruins in Genomics, that provides substantive graduate school preparation.

The Collaboratory 

The Collaboratory, a central component of the Institute for Quantitative & Computational Biosciences (QCB), brings together experimental and computational biologists for collaboration and skill development. By teaching workshops and providing expert consulting, Collaboratory fellows have enabled hundreds of experimentalists that include contemporary genomic technologies in their research, and make novel discoveries. 

The mission of the QCBio Collaboratory is to provide computational research support to projects initiated by experimentalists. This mission is pursued at three levels: (i) collaborative support or consulting work, (ii) workshops to convey commonly used bioinformatics skills, including the analysis of Next Gen Sequencing data, (iii) servers that enable a semi-automated workflow for common types of analyses of next generation sequencing data.  These activities are supported by the QCB Collaboratory postdoctoral fellows, who are selected from a broad applicant pool for renewable annual appointments.

For more information, please visit the QCBio site.

Last updated
December 5, 2023