A study of 375 American universities published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (November  16, 2007 issue) reported that the Rutgers Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics earned a top ten ranking nationally when compared with corresponding programs in the category of “Bioinformatics & Computational Biology.” The study was based on the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index developed by Academic Analytics, LLC.

The following new course is being offered by BioMaPS faculty member Gyan Bhanot in the Spring 2009 semester:

01:694:421. Special Topics in Molecular Biology: Introduction to bioinformatics and evolutionary modeling of human populations.

Prerequisite: 694:408 or 447:385 or 146:478. The goals of this course are to explain fundamental principals of evolutionary population genetics using simple mathematical ideas and tools, understand the role of mutations, drift, selection, migration, segregation and recombination in determining population structure and dynamics, understand how to find disease associated mutations, perform phylogenetic analysis, create models of human migration and evolution, and perform Monte Carlo simulations to study evolution. We will develop all the necessary concepts required from first principles.