Bioinformatics/Computational Biology

My d20 is interested in working in the field of Computational Biology. She knows she will need an advanced degree but as an undergraduate what should she be thinking of as a major? There are not very many universities that have this as an undergraduate degree.

My son did a Chem BS, with as much computer science as he could take. He’s in a bioinformatics MS program now.

Quite a few CS departments offer a computational biology as one of their undergraduate CS programs/tracks.

My daughter is a sophomore, and this is her major. She’s looking at doing the 5 year MS program at WPI. PM me if you have any questions!

My kid is a double major, CS and Data Science at Berkeley, and in DS everyone chooses a domain emphasis. It’s sort of like a mini-minor. Computational Biology is one of his finalists (he hasn’t declared yet). In the SF Bay Area, there are tons of Biotech companies that look for people with a degree in Computational Biology, or with a background in it.

If you are open to Canadian universities quite a few offer undergraduate programs in Bioinformatics including the University of Toronto and McGill University as well as some other less selective schools.

You can find the courses at many colleges to make this a concentration even if not full degree. In fact, some might argue best to major in bio and then minor or add on the data science components so that you have the hard science ‘down’ and are in better position for grad school down the line. You can always add on new CS/data science technical skills but it’s hard to go back and get the basic science foundation that a full bio major provides.

Great field of study with a lot of opportunity!

Thank you everyone. I guess I should be a bit more specific about location. My d is looking for schools in the south and midwest.

My nephew who has a ms in this was a math major in undergrad

Michigan has a Life Science Informatics major. Also, you can major in CS with a Bioinformatics concentration track.

If you’re considering a school in the Midwest, WashU has a Bioinformatics minor in the Engineering department and a concentration in Computational Biology in the Biology major.

For southern schools, I would assume Rice and Vanderbilt would have similar concentrations.

UNC has bioinfomatics or computational bio – they may call it quantitative bio, I forget.

Furman is also strong in this area.

Thank you to everyone who has responded. You are very helpful!

In the link below I have configured the CS ranking to include only those schools with professors that have published in the interdisciplinary area of computational biology. You can scroll through the resulting list as one means of guiding your search.

Good Luck!

http://csrankings.org/#/index?bio

@Mastadon Why thank you! That is very helpful. I can already see some schools she may want to put on her list!

William and Mary has an undergraduate program; they call it Mathematical Biology. University of Houston also has a couple of similar BS degrees.