How we got here
Computational biology at UVA has grown alongside the field itself—from the early days of sequence analysis to today's AI-powered discoveries.
The pioneer years (1985–1993)
UVA was fortunate to have Bill Pearson, one of the field's earliest pioneers, who developed the FASTA algorithm in 1985—a well-known file format and tool for sequence comparison. While computational work initially supported wet lab experiments, the potential for computation as a research discipline in its own right was already emerging.
In 1993, recognizing the need for specialized computing support in health sciences, UVA created the ITC-ACHS group—a partnership aimed at providing the advanced computing power that biological research increasingly demanded.
The genomics revolution (2001–2007)
Everything changed when the human genome was sequenced in 2001 and microarray technology made it possible to measure thousands of genes at once. Suddenly, biological data exploded in volume and complexity.
UVA responded by establishing cores and centers to support this new landscape. The Bioinformatics Core (formed in 2001) helped researchers make sense of their data. Then in 2007, the Center for Public Health Genomics (CPHG) was established to connect genomics directly to human health—bridging lab work with computational approaches to understand complex diseases.
Building expertise across campus (2005–2019)
As the field matured, UVA recruited faculty whose research was primarily or entirely computational. This expertise grew across schools:
School of Medicine: Faculty focused on gene regulation, next-generation sequencing, computational epigenomics, and integrating multiple types of biological data to understand disease.
School of Engineering: The Biomedical Engineering department built a nationally recognized program in systems biology—reconstructing and modeling how biological networks function. They also developed strong capabilities in biomedical image analysis.
College of Arts & Sciences: From structural biology and macromolecular crystallography to phylogenomics and evolutionary analysis, computational approaches became integral to understanding life at multiple scales.
In 2019, UVA established its School of Data Science—the university's first new school in over a decade. Fueled by a $120 million gift (the largest in UVA history), the School represents a major institutional commitment to data science, with computational biology as a key application area. Phil Bourne, a computational biologist formerly at the NIH, was recruited to lead the school.
Establishing the PhD program (2024)
What began with scattered islands of computational expertise has grown into a thriving ecosystem. By 2024, UVA had assembled one of the most comprehensive computational biology communities in the country, spanning Medicine, Engineering, Arts & Sciences, and Data Science—bringing together diverse perspectives from algorithms and software engineering to applications in medicine, evolution, and human health.
The Computational Biology PhD Program was formally established in 2024 to recognize and support this decades-long buildup of expertise. The program trains researchers who are equally comfortable with code and biology, preparing the next generation for modern biological research where computational skills are essential.
The COBI PhD program is the natural culmination of UVA's long commitment to computational biology, providing a formal home for students and faculty who have been doing this interdisciplinary work all along.