Daniel Baugh Institute

The Institute's History

Daniel Baugh Institute (DBI), founded in 1911 and endowed by Daniel Baugh, a prominent Philadelphia businessman and very active board member of Thomas Jefferson University. The Institute began as an anatomy research organization, as new methods were driving great progress in that field at the time.

The Daniel Baugh Institute was reformulated when new faculty joined Thomas Jefferson University in March, 2000, moving from a Computational Biology Group in the DuPont Company (led by Dr. James Schwaber, pictured below in June, 1999) in order to join collaborators already in the Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cell Biology, including Drs. Hoek, Knudsen and Kholodenko.

From the beginning we have envisioned the DBI as a part of a partnership with the University of Delaware Engineering College. Jefferson is the medical College for the state of Delaware and this partnership brings together the needed cross-disciplinary faculty and environments. As one of a very few of academic groups working in bioinformatics, the new Institute aims to blend medical and engineering faculties to support research, educational and business initiatives. Collaborating investigators/Institute members include Drs. Gao, Edwards, Robinson, Tunde and Elias at the University of Delaware Engineering College (UDel).

Below, this picture shows some Institute members on the 5th floor of Jefferson Alumni Hall in front of the plaque honoring the bequest from Daniel Baugh that supports the Institute and the picture of the original building, part of the gift, which initially housed the Institute. The building is located at the corner of 11th Street and Clinton. Some Institute faculty and their labs are missing from the picture: those of Profs. Jan Hoek and Boris Kholodenko.