UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched the Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative, a collaborative program that combines expertise in AI, computing, statistics, biology, and medicine to accelerate biomedical research and improve clinical care. The initiative aims to advance disease prevention, early detection, and the development of new therapies through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Key components of the initiative include hiring four new UC Berkeley faculty members with joint UCSF appointments, recruiting jointly mentored postdoctoral researchers, and developing BioJupyter, an open-source computational platform for biomedical research. Led by Yun Song, Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Statistics, and Director of the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley; James Fraser, Professor and Chair, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF; and Fernando Perez, Associate Professor of Statistics, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and co-inventor of the open source platform, Jupyter, the program seeks to establish a leading center for computational biomedicine, leveraging the complementary strengths of both institutions to speed scientific discovery and transform healthcare.