I agree with Kevin - I've rarely heard of a graduate school experience that started and ended in the expected research area. I wanted to add that outside of direct recommendations about certain departments, the best way to start finding out about which labs are doing lots of work in a particular area is to start looking to see who gives talks that are being given from about 2006-2008 at past and upcoming at conferences (in no particular order) of which there are many, but there are some popular ones such as: ISMB (Various sites -- google "ISMB 2006" "ISMB 2007" etc.) RECOMB (same as ISMB -- google "RECOMB" and the year) Gordon Research Conferences (bioinformatics etc). (http://www.grc.org) PSB (http://psb.stanford.edu/) Most talks have abstracts. Look for topics that pique your interest and then search for an institutional or lab website where you can read some of their papers. Then, you can check out the rest of the department while you're there. You can also do Google Scholar searches for the author. The advantage of this method is that you will invariably run across research that you haven't seen before, and you might get a good handle on what kinds of areas are increasingly interesting to you as you look through faculty research. If a lot of things still interest you, Kevin's recommendation is very helpful. There are, of course, many fine researchers that haven't presented at those conferences recently, but it's a start. -- Deanne Taylor Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health (address changing to) dtaylor at hsph.harvard.edu