Recent breakthroughs in computer technology, the life sciences and medicine have served as catalysts in the advancement of the Human Genome Project. As we enter the ``post-genomic'' era, the potential to exploit new data and technologies has created a new frontier in medical and ecological research that offers the promise to dramatically improve our world and fight disease. There is a tremendous opportunity to continue the marriage of bioscience and technology through further collaborations between biologists, medical researchers and computer engineers.

The College of Engineering, and a number of its faculty have been key partners on numerous University-wide collaborative research projects funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other governmental and private agencies. In particular, members of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – led by Prof. Thomas Casavant – have forged some of the most productive collaborations with the College of Medicine in the history of the University.

Engineers bring a special competency to bear on research with their health science colleagues. Basic engineering principles such as design, instrumentation, prototyping, optimization, and high-performance computing all have dramatic applications to the study of molecular biology and medicine, and often are a key element in advancing such research. A recent example is the discovery of more than 50,000 new genes in humans, mice, and rats. The large-scale annotation of these sets of genes has made a substantial contribution to the worldwide repositories of genome data. In addition, large-scale studies of the expression patterns of these genes, and the elucidation of the biological pathways in which their expression is induced has been rapidly accelerated by the use of large-scale, distributed database technologies. Methods in artificial intelligence that exploit network-based collaboration among teams of experts dispersed around the world are accelerating the isolation of genetic mutations that hold the key to beginning to understand complex genetic diseases. Advanced techniques employing Bayesian and Markov statistical techniques for searching multi-gigabyte databases of raw genomic data have been, and continue to be employed to identify candidate genes which may carry the mutations at the root of diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis, Hypertension, Obesity, Autism, Macular Degeneration, Birth Defects, Heart Disease, and Neurological Disorders, to mention only a few.

For the past six years Professors Tom Casavant (Electrical & Computer Engineering) M. Bento Soares (Biochemistry and Genetics) Val. C. Sheffield (Pediatrics and Genetics) and Edwin Stone (Ophthalmology and Genetics) have crossed academic disciplines to create ground-breaking research in the area of applied computational science within genomics, genetics and molecular biology. These efforts have included high-throughput genotyping, web-based tools for genetic linkage analysis, cDNA/EST sequencing, gene discovery and mapping, and most recently, micro-array hybridization and gene expression. To date, this inter-disciplinary research team has generated more than $35 million in external funding to advance this research. As a result, this team has become recognized worldwide for its contributions to the Human Genome Project. In addition, they have become poised to deploy some of the most valuable human resources engaged in this work.