What are the top bioinformatics graduate universities in the US?

May 24, 2007 1:44 PM

What are the top bioinformatics graduate universities in the US?

I tried US news, but only got the top 3 without a subscription. Otherwise, I've searched on the web for about 5 hours with no luck besides individual universities tooting themselves.

posted by lpctstr; to education (14 comments total)

What area of bioinformatics are you interested in? Are you after a Ph.D. or a Masters?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:55 PM on May 24, 2007

PhD. But more interested in just the good schools in general. I guess the area would be "sequence analysis and some structure prediction stuff".
posted by lpctstr; at 2:00 PM on May 24, 2007

Don't worry about not getting the full U.S. News rankings, since it is probably one of the worst ways to pick a graduate school.

Knowing what you want to do more specifically than "bioinformatics" will make a big difference in the answer. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to find someone who is working on something you are interested in, and then try to work with them. It'd suck to bust your ass trying to get into Harvard only to realize in your first year that the guy you really want to work with is actually at Virginia.

If you're interested in sequence analysis (my field, really), there are good people at UCSC, the Broad Institute (Harvard/MIT), Berkeley, Penn State, and Stanford. That's just what I can think of off the top of my head; there are definitely more.

Structure prediction is a totally different ball of polypeptides. You might want to look at the last CASP to see who does well.
posted by grouse at 2:13 PM on May 24, 2007

Almost everyone does "sequence analysis".

I'd strongly suggest you ignore the "top schools" question, and examine every bioinformatics program out there (there aren't that many of them). Focus on programs that suit you and professors who interest you. For example, what kinds of research questions interest you? Are you more biological, or computational, or mathematical? Interested in biomed or human health questions, then a school with strong ties with a medical school would be good. Find the program that suits your needs.

Off the top of my head...

UC Santa Cruz
University of Washington (WA)
Washington University in St. Louis (free pre-app!)
MIT
Cornell University (tri-institutional program)
UC San Diego
UC San Francisco (not sure if they actually have a program, but lots of great research)
Iowa State University
Boston University
Boston College (specialty within biology, I think)
Columbia University (Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics)
Duke University
Georgia Tech (my own school)
Rutgers University
Stanford University
posted by Mercaptan at 2:14 PM on May 24, 2007

thanks for the answers so far, and Mercaptan's list.

I just want a list of the good bioinformatics schools. I'm not applying, but thanks for the advice on that too.
posted by lpctstr; at 2:17 PM on May 24, 2007

Ah, then I should note that there is no decent definition for what makes a "good" bioinformatics program. The ones I listed are schools that I happen to know that have bioinformatics or computational biology programs.
posted by Mercaptan at 2:24 PM on May 24, 2007

Almost everyone does "sequence analysis".

I disagree with this statement. A visit to ISMB can be pretty disappointing for someone who is primarily interested in sequence analysis, when one realizes just how many bioinformaticians do something else.

I just want a list of the good bioinformatics schools.

But why? It's important to know what the list will be used for, or it can't be constructed in a meaningful way. There are schools on Mercaptan's list that I would not think of as being "good" for bioinformatics.
posted by grouse at 2:26 PM on May 24, 2007

The bioinformaticists at the University of Pennsylvania seem to focus on systems biology (genomic and tissue microarrays, proteomics) and evolutionary biology (phyogeny, evolutionary clock work). There's a lot of effort on the computational side of this.

Joe Ecker used to work here, managing the sequencing of a couple chromosomes of Arabidopsis, but moved to the Salk Institute.

While a "best of" ranking works well for undergraduate programs, you really make the most of a graduate program that is tied to your interests.

Find out who writes papers in the area you're interested in. Are they at institutions which have graduate programs? Take a closer look at the other faculty who teach and do research there. Does it match your field of interest?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:41 PM on May 24, 2007

Penn State!
posted by Loto at 2:44 PM on May 24, 2007

I disagree with this statement. A visit to ISMB can be pretty disappointing for someone who is primarily interested in sequence analysis, when one realizes just how many bioinformaticians do something else.

I should have said "uses sequence analysis". The use is pretty ubiquitous these days, but you're right that not every program has researchers who actually investigate or advance sequence analysis.
posted by Mercaptan at 3:08 PM on May 24, 2007

Virginia Tech's Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.
posted by pcward at 3:26 PM on May 24, 2007

IAA Bioinformatics PhD student, and I'm pretty happy at Baylor College of Medicine. It has one of the three big genome centers, along with Wash U and MIT.
posted by chrisamiller at 3:33 PM on May 24, 2007

The NIH dispenses Training Grants to many universities who have programs in bioinformatics. You could target schools that have been given the training grant and then apply to those institutions. Once in, you'd have to excel to earn the NIH Training Fellowship, but it'd be a nice spot on your CV if you had it. Google around for schools that advertise it, since I could not find a list of all the institutions that have received it.
posted by dendrite at 4:11 PM on May 24, 2007

You might consider George Washington University. I don't know anything about the program, but I do know one of the professors Rhys Price Jones as I had him when I was an undergraduate student. He is one of the sharper people I've met in CS and an excellent teacher. I would recommend that you contact him directly. If you want to drop my name, send me an email - it's in my profile. Try to get a feeling for his personality and if it would work for you. It worked very well for me.
posted by plinth at 7:10 AM on May 25, 2007