igsp headline news Published by KENDALL MORGANTuesday, July 10, 2012

Alex Hartemink, the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Computer Science, Statistical Science, and Biology, has been appointed as the new Director of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CBB) Program, effective July 2012. Based in the Duke Institute for Genomes Sciences& Policy, the CBB Program is an integrative, multi-disciplinary doctoral program encompassing the study of biology using computational and quantitative methods.

"I'm really excited to be doing this because of the many people who have contributed their time and energy to build the program to its present level of excellence," Hartemink said. "It's exciting to be involved with a program that inspires that kind of commitment, and I look forward to working with colleagues and students to make the program even better going forward."

In his new role, Hartemink will be responsible for the overall leadership, management, and maintenance of the PhD and certificate training activities of the program. Hartemink says that in addition to focusing on the existing doctoral program, he will also consider the potential for other innovative opportunities in computational biology and bioinformatics at Duke, including at the undergraduate and post-doctoral levels.

"This is an important time for the field because several strands are coming together at the same time," Hartemink says. "As one example, next-generation sequencing technology and the plummeting cost of sequencing has really changed the amount of data people regularly collect, and we need to be able to understand those data in a computationally efficient and statistically principled way. Quantitative expertise has become increasingly valuable in this big data world."

Learn more about the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program.

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Hartemink Named New Director for Duke's Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program