Mission
Albert Einstein College of Medicine is positioned to augment its current strength in exciting new directions. Through innovative research and education, The Department of Systems and Computational Biology focuses its efforts on advancing the understanding of living systems as a whole by promoting a new approach to biology that combines theoretical and experimental approaches aimed at explaining how the higher-level properties of complex biological systems materialize from the interactions among their parts.
Objective
The faculty develop research and education programs that embrace engineering, computational, mathematical, and physical sciences as an integral part of the Biological and Biomedical sciences, leading the foundation of a Systems and Computational Biology discipline. 
We seek to form an academic environment that benefits from, and respects the value of these existing disciplines. An important part of this fusion entails serious, sustained, and multidisciplinary research programs in pursuit of fundamental questions in Biology, ranging from the function of biological systems to an understanding of the evolution of life’s diversity.
The main challenges currently facing Biology involve the understanding of biological phenomena at a holistic, systems-level without neglecting the reductionist, detailed information approach related to its individual components. This is in contrast to the current, more prevailing “massively parallel reductionism” view. That is, despite the availability of vast amount of information, the focus, nonetheless, remains the individual components. Recently though, the academic community has recognized, once again, the need for integrated, systems-level strategies that combine computational and experimental tools, as well as evolutionary-based inferences, in addressing these challenges. It is this integration that defines the department’s activity.
