April 29, 2009

UCI’s systems biology program has been awarded two grants totaling $2.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to train graduate students for careers in this field. Conventional biologists seek to discover the components from which life is built – such as genes, proteins, cells and tissues – and their basic functions. Systems biologists take this idea a step further by focusing on the complex networks of interactions that take place among these components, and they try to understand the functions of such networks. Dr. Arthur Lander directs the Center for Complex Biological Systems, which brings biologists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers and computer scientists together to study this new field.