Stanford University has demonstrated excellence in biology, medicine, computer science, engineering and the other basic contributing disciplines that comprise biomedical computation. In the last two years, faculty from the schools of Medicine, Engineering and Humanities & Sciences have begun a grass-roots effort to organize biomedical computation so that the greatest scientific challenges facing modern biomedical research can benefit from the power of information technologies. In this proposal, we outline a planning process for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Computation (CBMC) with joint leadership from the Schools of Medicine and Engineering. The CBMC comprises structures that will allow Stanford scientists to create new methodologies in biomedical computation and apply these to the most difficult unsolved problems in biomedicine. The CBMC mission includes the creation of shared computational infrastructure, joint training of young scientists, and interdisciplinary collaborations falling outside traditional departmental boundaries. We outline a plan for continued and accelerated activities in this area to bring Stanford faculty together in a planning process for a full, larger response to the National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing program. These include continuing very successful biomedical computation research symposia, creation of new courses and curricula, and assessment of student and post-doctoral fellow trajectories in biomedical computing careers. We further define three development projects which will focus on (1) distributed database design and integration, (2) creating biomechanical models from image data and (3) simulation-based surgical training. These projects all involve interdisciplinary teams from multiple departments, and create the basic set of users for the proposed core support--including professional staff to help target, acquire and maintain large computational resources in support of this planning and research development process.
