The National Institutes of Health has awarded the University of Pittsburgh an $11 million, four-year grant to lead a Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Center of Excellence, an initiative that will help biomedical scientists capitalize more fully on large amounts of available data and to make data science a more prominent component of biomedical research. The Center for Causal Modeling and Discovery (CCMD) is a collaboration of researchers at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Yale University. The Center will develop and implement causal modeling and discovery algorithms to help address several key biomedical problems, including the discovery of cell signals that drive the development of cancer, the molecular basis for the onset and progression of several lung diseases, and the functional connections within the human brain. Dr. Gregory Cooper is the Center Director and an ISP faculty member, as are several other CCMD investigators.