A $5 million gift to Carnegie Mellon University will establish a center for computational biology focusing on cancer research, the university announced yesterday.

The gift from Ray and Stephanie Lane will also be used to endow a professorship in computational biology.

Professor Robert F. Murphy, who has taught at Carnegie Mellon since 1983, will direct the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology and receive the endowed chair.

"We are eager to support Bob's leadership in education, which we believe is critical for creating a pipeline of talented computational biologists to address biomedical research questions in profoundly new ways," said Mr. and Mrs. Lane in a statement.

Mr. Lane, a Pittsburgh native and member of Carnegie Mellon's board of trustees, is general partner of Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. A graduate of West Virginia University, he also served as president and chief operating officer of Oracle Corp.

Mrs. Lane is a board member of the American Cancer Society and founder of the Stephanie H. Lane Cancer Resource Network, which coordinates services for California cancer patients.

Mr. Murphy helped establish Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate major in computational biology in 1987 -- one of the first such programs in the country. He developed the field of location proteomics and an automated tool that pinpoints the location of proteins within cells.

For a joint doctoral program that Mr. Murphy co-founded with the University of Pittsburgh, he received a $1 million "Interfaces Initiative" grant two years ago from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.