Our mission is “system-level understanding of biological systems” in molecular biology and evolution (systems evolution) and medicine (omics-based medicine, systems pathology). Recently, the whole genome sequences of diverse organisms have become available. Moreover, various “omics” information such as a proteome, transcriptome, and metabolome are currently accumulating. Our goal is to establish a grand-theory of biological sciences from the viewpoint of “evolving networks composed of biological molecules” by integrating omics information. Genomic and omics data are also utilized in the field of medicine. It has been revealed that most diseases are caused by the interaction among abnormalities of multiple genes, those at the tissue level, and environments. It is therefore possible to consider diseases as a system. From this standpoint, we try to establish the omics-based medicine and systems pathology.

Prof. Tanaka is in charge of the education of medical informatics and bioinformatics. For undergraduates, he teaches “Clinical Informatics”, “Statistics for Health Sciences”, “Practice in Clinical Informatics II”, “Project Research”, and “Basics of Clinical Informatics”. For graduate students, he teaches “Computational Biology”, “Systems Pathology”, “Clinical Informatics”, “Integrated Bioinformatics”, “Integrated Translational Research”, and “Statistics for Nurses”. He also teaches “Cancer Systems Biology” for the “Training Program for Specialists in Cancer”. In addition, Prof. Tanaka supervises 23 graduate students in total.

The education policy of our department is to provide the education and training on both Medical Informatics and Genomic Science to the students who are going to play an active role in the research of Omics-based Medicine, which is one of the most rapidly developing research fields in recent years.