Education and Training Resources

B.S. in Computational Biology

Students are accepted to the world-renowned School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Success in computational biology requires significant technical knowledge of fundamental computer science as well as a broad biological intuition and general understanding of experimental biology. However, most importantly, it requires students who can integrate their knowledge by making connections between the two fields.

As much as any other field, making the interdisciplinary connections required to truly integrate biological and computational knowledge often requires a student to conduct research. In keeping this philosophy, we guarantee undergraduate research to all of our students.

Students completing the proposed major will be ideally prepared for Ph.D. programs in any of a range of biomedical areas, including Computational Biology, Systems Biology, or Quantitative Biology.

Students who choose to complete pre-med requirements will be very well-prepared to attend medical school; the next generation of physicians will need to better understand the computational approaches needed for automated medical testing, automated medical imaging, and the revolution in personalized medicine. There is also a significant industry demand for excellent computational biology students, in biotech firms, biomedical research, as well as in pharmaceutical research. Both established companies and startups struggle to find employees with the correct skillset, and our students will be able to take advantage of the fact that an undergraduate computational biology major has the rigorous training required to handle the challenges of modern research that is not provided by any of our peer institutions.

Year Program Established: 2017
Scholarships/assistanceships may be available: Yes
Type of academic terms: Semester

Average number of applicants per year: 10000
Average number of applicants accepted per year: 450
Average number of incoming students per year: 200
Average number of graduates per year: 15

Program URL: http://cbd.cmu.edu/education/bs-in-computational-biology.html

Contact Person: Samantha Mudrinich (smudrini@andrew.cmu.edu)