Principal Investigator Christopher Burge
Co-investigators Joel Voldman , Forest White , Jacob White , Ron Weiss , Alan Grossman , Amy Keating , B L Whang , Eric Alm , Mark Bathe , Ernest Fraenkel , Mehmet Fatih Yanik
Project Website http://csbi.mit.edu/education/phd.html
The Computational and Systems Biology (CSB) Ph.D. Program prepares students to become independent, interdisciplinary researchers in post-genomic biology and related fields. There is a strong focus on quantitative methods and modeling, experimental design, and device development. This unique program integrates MIT's world-class research and educational opportunities in biology, engineering, and computer science.
The emerging field of systems biology represents an integration of concepts and ideas from the biological sciences, engineering disciplines, and computer science. Recent advances in biology, including the Human Genome Project and massively parallel approaches to probing biological samples, have created new opportunities to understand biological problems from a systems perspective. Systems modeling and design are well established in engineering disciplines but are relatively new to biology. Microsystems has been fundamental to advances in electronics and computing, but now has the potential to revolutionize biology as well. Advances in systems biology will require multidisciplinary teams to apply principles and tools from engineering and computer science to solve problems in biology and medicine.
To provide training in this emerging field, MIT offers a Ph.D. Program in Computational and Systems Biology (the CSB Ph.D. Program). Spanning the School of Engineering and the School of Science, the program integrates coursework and research opportunities in biology, engineering, mathematics, microsystems, and computer science with interdisciplinary courses in computational and systems biology developed for this program. Graduates of the program will be uniquely prepared to develop original methods, make discoveries, and establish new paradigms. They will also be well-positioned to assume critical leadership roles in academia and industry, where this new research area is of growing importance.