Since Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, the pace of scientific discovery in life sciences has grown exponentially. This is partly due to the amazing development of technologies, especially in the areas of data acquisition and data analysis.

The advent of microarray technologies, nanotechnology and DNA sequencing techniques have generated massive amounts of data, which would have taken lifetimes to be processed without the power of computers. It has been said that life sciences will be the most computer-intensive scientific field of the 21st century.

The challenges to analyze such data may be recent in the field of life sciences, but tools and solutions already existed in the fields of engineering, mathematics, statistics and computer science. Presented here is a small subset of examples that show how several engineering fields can come together to bring solutions for life sciences' challenges.