Each department represented in this program participates in various interdisciplinary graduate programs in addition to providing very strong intradisciplinary graduate training. One example is the La Jolla Interfaces in Science program (LJIS), a campus- and mesa-wide fellowship opportunity sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. LJIS supports exploration of interfaces between the biological and biomedical sciences and the physical, computer, and mathematical sciences at UCSD, The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), The Salk Institute, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Bioengineering, ranked number one nationally by U.S. News and World Report, has several new faculty hires in the area of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and has identified Bioinformatics as a major area of focus.

Biology, a premier division at UCSD, will spearhead the interdisciplinary, undergraduate specialization in Bioinformatics and is planning to hire new faculty in Bioinformatics fields.

Biomedical Sciences, is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, based in the School of Medicine, with tracks in Pharmacology, Physiology, and Cellular and Molecular Medicine. It will be closely linked to the planned new School of Pharmacy. In addition to a strong computational biology presence amongst its faculty, there are plans to hire more faculty whose main interests are in computational pharmacogenomics and bioinformatics.

Chemistry and Biochemistry, the home of the Molecular Biophysics Training Grant, is highly recognized for its strong computational biology program with plans to further expand in chemo and bioinformatics areas.

Computer Science and Engineering is unique in having a critical mass of faculty whose research interests focus on biology. These faculty have very strong collaborative research interactions with biology, chemistry, and engineering researchers. CSE is currently recruiting for a senior faculty member with computational biology expertise.

Mathematics has expressed strong interest in building in the area of bioinformatics with emphasis on statistics and probability. This focus is one of fundamental importance for the future of bioinformatics and the department is committed to both hiring new faculty and launching new courses in statistics pertinent to bioinformatics.

Physics is the home of leaders in the field of computational statistical mechanics applied to biology, and provides the foundation for sophisticated modeling of complex biological systems. Physics also plans to recruit new faculty members whose research focus will be on development of information/theory-based models of biological systems.