Robert F. Murphy

Robert F. Murphy is the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology and Director of the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. He also is Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning, and directs (with Ivet Bahar) of the joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. In 2003 he obtained a major grant from the National Science Foundation to found the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon (of which he and Jelena Kovacevic were the initial Directors). From 2005-2007, he served as the first full-term chair of NIH’s Biodata Management and Analysis Study Section. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award honoree. Dr. Murphy has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the Arthritis Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He has co-edited two books and three special journal issues on cell imaging, and has published over 160 research papers. He is President of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry, was named as the first External Senior Fellow of the School of Life Sciences in the Freiburg (Germany) Institute for Advanced Studies, and was appointed to the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council in 2009.

Dr. Murphy’s career has centered on combining fluorescence-based cell measurement methods with quantitative and computational methods. His group at Carnegie Mellon did extensive work on the application of flow cytometry to analyze endocytic membrane traffic beginning in the early 1980’s and pioneered the application of machine learning methods to high-resolution fluorescence microscope images depicting subcellular location patterns in the mid 1990’s. This work led to the development of the first systems for automatically recognizing all major organelle patterns in 2D and 3D images. He currently leads NIH-funded projects for proteome-wide determination of subcellular location in 3T3 cells (with Peter Berget and Jonathan Jarvik) and continued development of the SLIF system for automated extraction of information from text and images in online journal articles (with William Cohen and Eric Xing). His group is also responsible for providing image informatics tools for the NIH-funded Technology Center for Networks and Pathways (headquartered at Carnegie Mellon).

Dr. Murphy’s leadership experience includes developing the first formal undergraduate program in computational biology in 1987 and founding the Merck Computational Biology and Chemistry program at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. These programs were important forerunners to the 2005 establishment of a joint Ph.D. program in computational biology with the University of Pittsburgh, which he and Ivet Bahar direct. Under their leadership, this program was chosen as one of only ten awardees through Phase I of the HHMI-NIBIB Interfaces Initiative and recently received Phase II training grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Dr. Murphy received an A.B. in Biochemistry from Columbia College and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Charles Cantor at Columbia University.