At QBI, we believe the most important scientific breakthroughs happen when walls come down. In traditional academia, researchers are often rewarded for working alone, which can slow progress and limit what’s possible. Many of today’s toughest biomedical challenges simply can’t be solved in isolation.
We create teams that span disciplines—where each scientist brings unique, complementary expertise—and give them the tools to work seamlessly together. This way, discovery flows more freely from the lab bench to the clinic, and ideas that might never emerge in a siloed system can take shape.
What excites me most is seeing how quickly collaborative science can move. When people with different strengths work toward the same goal, the solutions we once thought were far off suddenly feel within reach.
QBI has a strong leadership team that facilitates decisions and guides the institute towards its goals. The members of the QBI Executive Committee are experienced scientists and have been dedicated to supporting QBI and the greater UCSF community for years. Their exceptional achievements are a sound but optimistic lense through which they see and guide the future aspirations of the Institute.
Building on years of achievement, QBI’s Associate Directors combine expertise with innovation to explore new frontiers, guide the Institute’s growth, and inspire the next generation of scientific discovery.
QBI’s vision centers on team science driven by network mapping of the cell. Building on decades of work identifying genes linked to disease, QBI focuses on the next step: understanding how the proteins encoded by those genes physically and functionally interact in both healthy and diseased states.
These interaction cell maps inform mechanistic and structural studies, connect to patient cohorts, and bring together scientists across genetics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, systems and structural biology, and clinical research. Because this approach is disease-agnostic, it can be applied across a wide range of disease areas. Research initiatives that emerged from QBI and its investigators focus on cancer, neuropsychiatric diversity and infectious diseases.
The Quantitative Biosciences Institute was established at UC San Francisco in March 2016 as a new Organized Research Unit within the School of Pharmacy.
From its founding, QBI set out to advance the application of computation, mathematics, and statistics to some of the most complex challenges in biology. Built as a disease agnostic institute, QBI was designed to bring researchers together across disciplines to investigate fundamental biological questions to better understand disease and build new structures to enable drug discovery.
To learn more about QBI’s origins and early foundational progress, explore our 2016–2020 report.
