NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said today it has received a $50 million donation from the Jim and Marilyn Simons Foundation to establish a new research center focused on using quantitative biology to interpret genomic research data from a variety of diseases and disorders.
The Simons Center for Quantitative Biology will incorporate applied mathematics, computer science, theoretical physics, and engineering into basic research and studies of illnesses such as cancer, autism, bipolar disorder, and depression.
CSHL said it has recruited Adam Siepel from Cornell University to chair the Simons Center beginning in September. Siepel is currently associate director of the Cornell Center for Comparative and Population Genomics and director of the school's PhD program in computational biology.
Siepel's research at Cornell has focused on developing computational methods for identifying functional elements of eukaryotic genomes, mostly mammalian, based on comparative sequence data.
"The pace of modern science and the vast amount of data being generated, both in genomics and imaging, has necessitated an expansion of our research to include scientists with expertise in quantitative analysis," CSHL President Bruce Stillman said in a statement.