UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley have launched a joint program to develop the frontier of AI and biomedicine to accelerate advances in clinical care.
 
The Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative will bring together world-class faculty expertise in computing, AI, statistics, biology, and medicine, to speed discovery in everything from disease prevention to early detection and new therapeutics in health care. The initiative will create new faculty positions, support postdoctoral researchers, and provide funding to build a new open-source computational platform, BioJupyter.
 
“Our goal is to establish a world-leading hub in computational biomedicine by tightly connecting UC Berkeley and UCSF, and to create new opportunities for the best minds to collaborate in this field,” said Yun Song, PhD, professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Statistics, and director of the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley. “By combining advances in AI with breakthroughs in biology and medicine, we hope to accelerate discovery and transform how we understand, predict, and treat disease.”
 
The initiative is being jointly led by Song, UCSF Professor James Fraser, PhD, and Fernando Perez, who is faculty director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and co-inventor of the Jupyter open-source platform.
 
“The real potential of this initiative will be in making the connections that no one saw coming,” said Fraser, the Ernest L. Prien professor and chair of the UCSF School of Pharmacy's Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. “It’s tremendously exciting to be able to concentrate the innovative talent, scientific expertise, diverse data sets, and technology of both of our campuses to advance biomedical discovery.”
 
UCSF is among the world’s foremost academic medical centers, with excellence in biomedical research and clinical impact, and Berkeley is a renowned academic leader in AI, computing, and statistics.
 
UC Berkeley expects to launch a search for four new faculty members in computational biology this fall and will soon begin recruiting postdocs, who will be jointly mentored by scientists across UC Berkeley and UCSF. The new faculty will have a primary affiliation at UC Berkeley and joint affiliation at UCSF.