Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics

The Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics integrates research and educational activities in mathematics and its intimate ties with the physical, engineering, biological, medical, and social sciences. The center’s focus is to bring the power of mathematics to bear on the most intriguing, challenging, and relevant problems of our time, in collaborations with colleagues at UNC and elsewhere. These activities and advances in mathematics and scientific computation are continuously folded into our undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and provide broad research opportunities and collaborations with CCIAM faculty, post-doctoral scholars, and students.

Computational Medicine Program

The Computational Medicine Program seeks to integrate modern computational approaches with cutting-edge experimental techniques to advance the goal of predictive health care. Our goals include:

• Build expertise in computational medicine by partnering with departments to recruit faculty.
• Initiate interdisciplinary team science by providing meeting space, administrative support and seed funding for collaborative projects.
• Provide a community space for computational and mathematical biologists to meet and plan.
• Identify strategic initiatives for computational approaches in biological and biomedical research (example being RFA entitled “Emerging Questions in Cancer Systems Biology (U01)”).
• Provide mentoring for junior faculty, postdocs, and graduates students interested in a career in computational biology.
• Develop new graduate training opportunities.
• Promote research in computational medicine by hosting symposia and workshops.

Curriculum in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Modern biology, in this postgenome age, is being greatly enriched by an infusion of ideas from a variety of computational fields, including computer science, information science, mathematics, operations research, and statistics. In turn, biological problems are motivating innovations in these computational sciences. There is a high demand for scientists who can bridge these disciplines. The goal of the Curriculum in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) is to train such scientists through a rigorous and balanced curriculum that transcends traditional departmental boundaries.