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Introduction

The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) Program at Iowa State University is an interdepartmental graduate major offering outstanding opportunities for graduate study. 100 nationally and internationally known faculty take part in the BCB program including biologists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and statisticians – all who participate in a wide range of collaborative research projects.

Over 50 graduate students in the BCB Program have the opportunity to conduct research, with access to some of the most modern experimental platforms, in nine related areas of focus: Structural Bioinformatics, Comparative Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Predictive Plant Phonemics, Metabolomics, Machine Learning, Image Processing, and Biological Data Mining, modeling and analytics.

The BCB Training Program

BCB students are trained to develop an independent and creative approach to science through an integrated curriculum and interdisciplinary research projects in all major research areas of computational molecular biology, including genomics, met genomics, structural genomics, functional genomics, phylogenetics, and computational systems biology, with access to some of the most modern experimental platforms.

Learning Goals that students in this program are expected to meet include:

Be able to formulate a research question, devise a plan to answer it, and independently implement it, as evidenced by passing their preliminary exam and the dissertation defense.

Have a minimum of one paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The manuscript should be directly related to their dissertation project, and they should have contributed a substantial part of the work and authorship. However, the expectation is that a typical dissertation consists of 2-4 independently publishable manuscripts.

Be able to communicate science clearly as evidenced by oral presentations, poster presentations, and the writing of articles, grant proposals, or both.

Be able to program: develop and encode methods for data discovery and/or analysis (as opposed to the exclusive deployment of existing software and tools for computational analyses).

Be experts in both the biological and computational components of their fields of study.

Meeting these expectations is built into BCB course requirements and POS committee expectations. The major professor, or the major professor and co-major professor jointly, must be competent to oversee the interdisciplinary research required of students. Care should be taken that each student supervised in the program shall be able to receive unhindered guidance in both fields, to best serve the program’s requirements.