Recent advances in gene sequencing have made it possible to determine DNA sequences for entire genomes, and much of modern biology is devoted to understanding how information at the level of the gene codes for physical traits. The field of bioinformatics seeks to provide a quantitative framework for understanding how genomic sequences affect organismal characteristics.

The Department of Scientific Computing at FSU has taken a leading role in the establishment of a closely related discipline that develops and uses state-of-the-art computational techniques to answer fundamental questions about how the current diversity of life on earth has evolved.

The Computational Evolutionary Biology (CEB) group makes basic contributions in the theory and methodology of inferring evolutionary trees and population processes. Moreover, the group members are committed to transferring the technology they produce to the general biological community in the form of powerful and easily usable software-in fact, a large proportion of the evolutionary trees constructed by biologists today are computed using computer programs developed by CEB members.