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An Inspired Origin
A Unique Organization
Focus. The ICM applies the most advanced methods of modern engineering, mathematics, and computational sciences to understanding and treating human disease. Since much of this work involves computational theory and analysis in "crunching" and organizing huge amounts of data related to the human body's sub-molecular structures and processes, the Institute's founders coined the term "computational medicine" to describe their unique methodology and purpose. No other research center has either the capabilities or strategic configuration to match the ICM's present capabilities in this new discipline.
Approach. The ICM takes a flexible, goal-driven approach to understanding human disease simply by assembling the best interdisciplinary team possible to address the challenges at hand. While the Institute will develop its own avenues of research and maintain its own faculty, staff, fellows, and students, it will continue to seek out collaborative relationships with other Hopkins-based biomedical research teams. Already, the ICM is working in tandem with a number of key University departments and institutes throughout the Schools of Medicine and Engineering.
Diverse research opportunities leading to the Ph.D. degree are available within the ICM. To learn more about the Graduate Program in Computational Medicine, please visit the education page of this website.
An Outstanding Location
Given the advanced status of the ICM itself, it is only
appropriate that its offices and labs are
located in Hopkins' new Computational Sciences and Engineering
(CSE) Building, recently completed on the Homewood
campus. This building itself is breaking new ground
in interdisciplinary research, providing the opportunity
for students and faculty, as well as
other researchers from a variety of disciplines across
Johns Hopkins and private industry, to
gather together under the same roof, cutting across traditional
boundaries to work on problems of
common interest.
The CSE Building opened in the summer of 2007 with over 11,000 net square feet of space occupied by the ICM's faculty, staff, and students. In place of traditional wet labs, the Institute operates high-performance computing and information storage labs.
An Extraordinary Potential
Through the development of advanced quantitative approaches
and techniques for managing and
modeling biomedical data, computational medicine provides
a new and accelerated path for confronting such major
human ailments as heart disease and
cancer, by:
- Understanding the causes of diseases through the precise management and analysis of vast amounts of biomedical data;
- Providing earlier diagnoses of diseases, through the identification of certain molecular "bio-markers" that signal disease risk, and
- Discovering new approaches for disease treatment through computational models of biological systems, on which new therapies can be tested virtually.
