Concentration in Computational Biology

The Concentration in Computational Biology (CCB) is open only to undergraduate students in the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University.  If you are an undergraduate outside SCS who is interested in computational biology, we encourage you to please check out our minor in computational biology or additional major in computational biology.

CCB offers a pathway for SCS undergraduates to receive a significant exposure to the field of computational biology without requiring extensive coursework in biology and other science courses. 

Learning Objectives

CCB's goal is to provide foundational coursework in computational biology that will allow undergraduate students in SCS to start building a skillset useful for understanding many of the modern technologies developed by researchers as well as companies in the biotech and biomedical arenas.

Students will, by way of completing this concentration:

• model biological systems at the molecular and cellular levels using a variety of approaches;
• generate their own high throughput molecular biology data in a laboratory setting, and apply computational techniques to analyze the data they generate;
• transform hazy biological problems involving genomic data into well-defined computational problems, design algorithms to solve these problems, and adapt them to biological data;
• explore additional coursework of interest in genomics, biological research automation, biological image analysis, or computational biology research.

CCB also provides students completing a computational degree other than the major in computational biology with the opportunity to make a transition toward a career in computational biology. 

Prerequisites

Note that not all of the prerequisites below are required to take every course in CCB (for example, 02-251 does not have any of the pre-requisites below), but these courses are required to complete all of the required coursework and should be completed early within the concentration.

Further, the following two courses are not technically required as prerequisites to the CCB courses, but they are strongly suggested prerequisites because they provide students with helpful surveys of fundamental topics in biology and computational biology.

*02-251 is allowed if 02-180 and 02-181 are not offered 

Course Requirements

Five courses in total are required for CCB. The following four courses are required as part of a central core of coursework; they consist of three computational biology courses as well as an introductory machine learning course, which today is fundamental for even an introductory understanding of the field.

¹ Students may take 03-343 if 02-261 is not offered. 

In addition to these four courses, one elective course is required. Any 02-listed (Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department) undergraduate course of at least 9 units at the 300-level or above may satisfy this requirement; graduate courses may be applied to this category with permission.

Double counting rules

CCB follows the general SCS rule that any concentration requires at least three courses (of at least 27 units) that are not double counted with any other requirements of any major, minor, or other concentration that the student is pursuing.

Accordingly, CCB is expressly closed to majors and additional majors in computational biology.

CS and AI majors completing CCB are encouraged to double-count 10-315 as well as 02-261 as their lab science course. Suggested prerequisites 03-151 and 02-251 also count as requirements for these degrees (as a science & engineering course and domains course, respectively).

*Students who take two intro minis from 02-180, 05-180, 07-180, and 16-180 during their first year may use these two courses together as one SCS elective. 

Last updated: August 2024