Bioinformatics & Computational Biology = same? No.
Dr. Russ Altman is a professor at Stanford University, and a foundation of the field of biomedical informatics. I highly recommend further reading of his blog, Building confidence. Here he differentiates computational biology and bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics & Computational Biology = same? No.: I spent the first 15 years of my professional life unwilling to recognize a difference between bioinformatics and computational biology. It was not because I didn’t think that there was or could be a difference, but because I thought the difference was not significant. I have changed my position on this. I now believe that they are quite different and worth distinguishing. For me,
Computational biology = the study of biology using computational techniques. The goal is to learn new biology, knowledge about living sytems. It is about science.
Bioinformatics = the creation of tools (algorithms, databases) that solve problems. The goal is to build useful tools that work on biological data. It is about engineering.
All this became important to me when I finally joined a bioengineering department, and I was forced to ask myself if I was a scientist or an engineer. I am both, and now am at peace.
(Via Building confidence..)
I find this useful as I would have struggled to differentiate the two as well, and it is the classic question in clinical informatics as well. My first exam in the DBMI Introduction to Informatics course asked us to define whether medical informatics was a scientific or and engineering discipline. Four and a half years later, I am not sure an exact response exists. While the research is all done in the name of science and practiced in a scientific manner, the science is usually based on some engineering work, and the end-goal is generally in hopes of improving healthcare - which cannot happen without applying results to the engineering of clinical systems of some variety.