UMD's Department of Biology Launches Quantitative Biology Initiative
The University of Maryland’s Department of Biology launched the Quantitative Biology Initiative (QBI), a departmental effort to advance quantitative approaches to understanding life science through research, training and community-building opportunities for faculty members and students. Composed of nine core lab groups, QBI brings together scientists across diverse disciplines who are united through an interest in using quantitative methods to answer biological questions.
“Living systems—cells, organisms, ecosystems—are not governed by simple rules, and experimental approaches alone can’t fully capture biological complexity,” explained Joshua Singer, chair of the Department of Biology. “We need computational approaches to advance research in varied disciplines like infectious disease dynamics, macrosystems ecology, sensory coding and protein biochemistry. With this need for new tools comes a need for a new generation of biologists trained differently from their predecessors: they will need to think a bit like physicists and to integrate math and computer science with traditional biology.”
QBI researchers investigate topics in ecology and evolution, epidemiology, and sensory neuroscience. Some researchers work at the nexus of two or more of these issues, such as Emme Bruns, who studies how plants evolve alongside the diseases that infect them. Investigators utilize and develop cutting-edge quantitative approaches, leveraging recent advances in areas that include machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
Students who engage with QBI will have access to a range of courses taught by faculty members and postdocs, extracurricular experiences like the Quantitative Ecology & Evolutionary Dynamics (QEED) Seminar Series, and undergraduate teaching opportunities through UMD’s student-initiated courses (STICs) program.
The Quantitative Biology Postdoctoral Fellow Program is currently accepting applications for its first cohort (best consideration date of March 14, 2026) and will biannually recruit postdocs to work alongside QBI faculty members to solve critical problems in the field.
“The collaborative nature of the QBI postdoc program, where each fellow will have two faculty mentors, will not only advance research but also provide a concrete mechanism for strengthening the community interactions that lie at the heart of the QBI,” said Philip Johnson, who is chairing the fellowship’s departmental search committee.
“The QBI is a small step toward uniting traditionally disparate fields, and our fellows program represents the beginning of our efforts to train the biologists of the future here at UMD,” Singer added.
