The Department of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science & Technology was founded in 2002 by senior Professors Qingming Luo, Yanhong Zhou and Bifeng Liu (the first head of the department). The department now has 10 professors and nearly 20 faculty and staff members, all holding Doctoral Degrees and having international education experiences. Their research areas have covered biological data generation by microfluidics technology, bioinformatics method/tool development, cancer genomics, non-coding RNA analysis, protein modification analysis, microbiome, multi-omics big-data data-mining and AI biology, etc.
The department has made profound achievements since its establishment: Firstly, it was one of the few departments in China that has full range of BS, MS and PhD educations since 2004 till now. Secondly, the nearly 20 faculty and staff members has made it one of the largest department focusing on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology in China. Thirdly, the department has been affiliated with several key labs and research centers, including: Key Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics of the Ministry of Education, Hubei Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Molecular-imaging, Center of AI Biology. Finally, it has established collaboration relationship with more than 50 research groups worldwide, and the graduated students has also been studying and working in more than 20 universities and research institutes around the world.
The department members have served as deputy directors and committee members for the Chinese Bioinformatics Association and various other associations. They have also served as editorial board members for several well-known journals including Scientific Reports, Genomics Proteomics, and Bioinformatics, and PloS ONE. Their works, with more than 50 publications annually, have appeared on high-profile journals including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, Genome Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, Advanced Materials, etc. They have also authored more than 100 Chinese patents and software copyrights.
