The mission of CIFR is to most effectively work towards combating the threat of fungal disease and to enhance industrial application of fungi through integration of a broad range of approaches and expertise within a formal scientific framework, to improve genomic research techniques through collaborative efforts with industry and technological partners, to disseminate related educational information to the general public and to provide training and instruction for students, post-doctoral fellows and visiting scientists in fungal biology and genomics.

More recently, CIFR is expanding the frontiers of biodiversity science with new tools, technologies, and translational research-based approaches. As human and machine-generated data continues to increase at exponential rates, there is a pressing need for new technologies that incorporate shared data standards to track and validate biodiversity data from scales of single sequences to full genomes. Developing new approaches for integrating highly heterogeneous data from agricultural, animal, environmental, and human health systems is emerging as one of the grand challenges of biology and foundational for both basic and applied research. CIFR aims to be a world leader in developing and deploying state-of-the art tools for teaching and training the next generation of scientists as well as disseminating educational information to citizens, policy makers and stakeholders.