By Meharry Medical College
Meharry Medical College is expanding its academic computational science programs with a new Biomedical Data Science Ph.D. at the School of Applied Computational Sciences. The School is currently accepting applications for the first Ph.D. cohort that will begin classes in August of 2022.
“This is an exciting addition to our master’s degrees and graduate certificates in data science and biomedical data science,” says Fortune S. Mhlanga, dean, School Applied Computational Sciences. “Our Ph.D. students could discover new knowledge from biomedical data sets and develop new technologies and novel data analysis methods through their research.”
Biomedical data science is a relatively new field that has great potential to transform health care, medicine, biology and scientific discovery.
“Our students can impact society by helping to develop drugs faster and cheaper, detect diseases earlier, and improve clinical decisions for the underserved,” says Dr. T.L. Wallace, chair, Biomedical Data Science Department.
The curriculum for the Biomedical Data Science Ph.D. program combines mathematics, computational science, biostatistics, biomedical informatics, biomedical image processing and analysis, artificial intelligence and deep learning, and computer programming.
“Students will start with foundational and core courses that include predictive modeling, computational structural biology, applied artificial intelligence and machine learning, mathematical and statistical theory, advanced biostatistics and epidemiology,” says Dr. Wallace.
“They will then pursue research in areas of biomedical data science that interest them. They will have access to our high-performance supercomputing network, SACS research faculty, and our robust dataset developed from the Meharry Health System and other sources,” says Dr. Wallace.
