Supported by a three-year $2.7 million grant from the
U.S. Department of Energy, Johns Hopkins and two partner
institutions, the University of Delaware and Los Alamos
National Laboratory, have established a new advanced
institute dedicated to computational biology research and
education.
The Institute for Multi-Scale Modeling of Biological
Interactions will draw on a variety of scientific
disciplines to study biological systems across multiple
scales of time and length, ranging from protein
interactions at the molecular level to the behavior of
complex biochemical networks in entire organisms.
"Applications of mathematical modeling and simulations
to describe biological interactions have become
increasingly important in recent years as a complement to
traditional laboratory research," said Michael Paulaitis, a
Johns Hopkins professor of
chemical and
biomolecular engineering, who will serve as director of
the new institute. "However, in recognizing the growing
acceptance of the computational methods themselves, this
new institute will focus on applying combinations of
computational methods as a general and clearly powerful
approach to unraveling the hierarchical nature of complex
biological interactions."
The institute is unique in that it will involve more
than 20 faculty members from three divisions within Johns
Hopkins — the
Whiting School of Engineering, the
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the
School of Medicine — as well as faculty from
Delaware and researchers from Los Alamos.
The participants come from such diverse disciplines as
biophysics, chemistry, physiology, chemical and
biomolecular engineering, biomedical engineering,
mechanical engineering, and electrical and computer
engineering.
Three faculty members will serve as institute
co-directors: Bertrand Garcia-Moreno, professor of
biophysics at
Johns Hopkins; Pablo Iglesias, professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Johns Hopkins; and Abraham Lenhoff,
professor of chemical engineering at the University of
Delaware.
William R. Brody, president
of Johns Hopkins, said, "The new institute, which will help
train the next generation of researchers in the emerging
field of computational biology, is an outstanding example
of the type of multidisciplinary collaboration that is so
important in the advancement of science and technology."
The institute builds on the Program in Computational
Biology at Johns Hopkins supported by a Burroughs Wellcome
Fund "Interfaces" seed grant. Awarded in 1999, that
five-year initiative supported interdisciplinary training
in computational biology at the interface between the
biological sciences and the physical, chemical and
computational sciences at Johns Hopkins. According to
Paulaitis, "The Institute for Multi-Scale Modeling of
Biological Interactions represents our next step in an
integrated, multidisciplinary approach to computational
biology."
The federal grant will allow the new institute to
support doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. Each
will choose two faculty mentors and select research
projects that involve modeling or computer simulation of
biological interactions on different time/length scales.
To complement the research, the institute will also
offer courses on such topics as the modeling of biological
macromolecules, properties of macromolecular solutions,
membrane biology and systems biology.
About 10 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows
are expected to participate in the institute's training
program at any one time. Several postdoctoral fellows have
already entered the program at Johns Hopkins, Paulaitis
said, and the first doctoral students are expected to
enroll next fall; in addition, two doctoral students have
begun the program at the University of Delaware.
Researchers at Los Alamos will be available to serve as
co-mentors.