UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched a joint program called the Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative to develop the frontier of AI and biomedicine, tremendously accelerating advances in clinical care. The new partnership brings together world-class faculty expertise in computing, AI, statistics, biology and medicine, to speed discovery in everything from disease prevention, to early-detection and new therapeutics in healthcare.
The initiative will create new faculty positions, support postdoctoral researchers and provide funding to build a new open-source computational platform, BioJupyter. Leadership for the initiative includes Yun Song, Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Statistics, and Director of the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley; James Fraser, Ernest L. Prien Professor and Chair, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF; and Fernando Pérez, Associate Professor of Statistics, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and co-inventor of the open source platform, Jupyter.“Our goal is to establish a world-leading hub in computational biomedicine by tightly connecting UC Berkeley and UCSF, and to create new opportunities for the best minds to collaborate in this field,” said Song.“By combining advances in AI with breakthroughs in biology and medicine, we hope to accelerate discovery and transform how we understand, predict, and treat disease.”UC Berkeley expects to launch a search for four new faculty members starting this fall and will soon be recruiting postdocs, who will be jointly mentored by scientists across UC Berkeley and UCSF.“The new faculty in computational biology will have primary affiliation at UC Berkeley and joint affiliation at UCSF,” said Jennifer Chayes, Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. “UCSF is one of the foremost academic medical centers in the world, with unparalleled excellence in medical research and clinical impact, and Berkeley’s collective strengths in AI, computing and statistics are unmatched among research universities.”James Fraser at UCSF is especially enthusiastic at the prospect of concentrating the talent, expertise and technology of both campuses, in service to advancing biomedical discovery and healthcare for all.“I’m excited to see how an innovative cohort of postdoctoral fellows and the further development of the Jupyter platform can help connect data from diverse efforts across UCSF and UC Berkeley,” Fraser said. “Making connections that no one saw coming is the incredible potential of the Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative.”
