The Laboratory was founded by Prof. Yanda Li, Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former Dean of the School of Information Sci. & Tech., Tsinghua University. In 2006, the faculty includes 4 professors and an associate professor, with a technician assisting on wet labs. About 30 graduate students and postdoctorial fellows study and work in the Laboratory.

    The Bioinformatics Division in the Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST) is based on the Laboratory for Computational Biology of the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, collaborating with several other bioinformatics laboratories in multiple departments of the university.

    Besides the support from Tsinghua University and TNLIST, the Laboratory is mostly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) via the 973 and 863 programs and the Ministry of Education (MOE). Industrial and international funds are also welcome.

Life science and information science are two major fronts of the science advancement in the 21st century. As the interdisciplinary field rooted from these two subjects, bioinformatics and computational biology are playing more and more important roles in today’s scientific discovery on Life.

    The mission of our laboratory is to pursue excellence in the scientific research and education on fundamental questions in modern life and health science with advanced informatics and systems viewpoints and approaches, and on the theoretical and methodological questions raised for information science and technology from these investigations.

Our major research areas are: the understanding of complicated molecular regulatory systems in cells, including transcriptional, splicing, noncoding RNA and epigenomic regulations, the understanding of genetic polymorphisms in populations especially with regard to complex diseases, and the application of computational systems biology in investigating diseases and in the modernization of Tranditional Chinese Medicine.