The Center for Computational Biology
A joint research center based in the Whiting School of Engineering, with faculty members in the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, Public Health, and Arts & Sciences
The Center for Computational Biology (CCB) is a multidisciplinary center dedicated to research on genomics, genetics, DNA sequencing technology, and computational methods for DNA and RNA sequence analysis. CCB brings together scientists and engineers from many fields, including biomedical engineering, computer science, biostatistics, genomics, genetics, molecular biology, physics, and mathematics, all of whom share a common interest in gaining a better understanding of how genes and genomes affect biological functions. We develop and apply technology that uses sequence data to study a wide range of questions, including how genes cause disease, how genes change in response to different conditions within the cell, and how genomes evolve.
Computational scientists in CCB develop novel software methods for analysis of sequencing data deriving from many different types of sequencing experiments, including:
- whole genome sequencing and assembly
- transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq)
- microbiome sequencing and analysis
- human re-sequencing
- methylation analysis (Methyl-seq)
- exome sequencing
In addition to its research program, CCB provides bioinformatics expertise to departments and centers throughout the Schools of Medicine and Public Health, through a consulting group trained in the latest computational methods. CCB provides the computing hardware for the analyses run through its consulting group.
CCB is organized as a research center within the Whiting School of Engineering, with faculty members spanning WSE, the School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The Center is closely affiliated with (1) the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is in the Schools of Medicine and Engineering; (2) the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering, and (3) the Department of Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Leadership
The Director of CCB is Prof. Steven Salzberg. The Associate Director of CCB is Prof. Mihaela Pertea. See the people page for a complete list of our faculty.Computing infrastructure
CCB has a high-performance computing facility operated jointly with the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), a JHU institute supporting scientific research ranging from medicine to astrophysics. The CCB computing facility includes large-scale data storage devices and multiple large-memory compute servers. CCB also relies on the campus-wide MARCC center, a computing grid with over 23,000 core processors and more than 20 petabytes of storage.Directions
As of January 2020, CCB is headquartered in the Wyman Park Building at the Homewood Campus. For a visitor map of the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus, please click here.
For a visitor map of the Johns Hopkins Medical Campus, please click here.
