Peter W. Arzberger, PhD
Founding Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA)
Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR)
“The Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) was formed in 2002 to establish sustained collaborations and advance the use of grid technologies in applications among a community of investigators working with leading institutions around the Pacific Rim.”
Website: http://www.nbcr.net/data/people/parzberger/index.php
Phil Bourne, PhD
Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California, San Diego
Associate Director , RCSB Protein Data Bank
Adjunct Professor, Burnham Institute
Editor-in-Chief , PLOS Computational Biology
“Our broad goal is to undertake in silico bioinformatics and systems biology related research and education (with emphasis on 3D structure) to improve our understanding of living systems.”
Website: http://www.sdsc.edu/~bourne/, http://www.sdsc.edu/pb/
Neil Davies, PhD
Director, University of California, Berkeley, Gump South Pacific Research Station, Moorea, French Polynesia
Principal Investigator, Moorea Biocode Project
Co-founder, Genomic Observatories Network
“Our goal is to develop Moorea as a model ecosystem for in vivo and in silico study. Our approach applies cutting-edge technology to observe the flux of genetic variation -- the Earth's "biocode" -- across human and natural ecosystems. We link place-based genomic data to other biophysical and socioeconomic data, applying a computational lens to develop predictive models of ecosystem health.”
Website: http://moorea.berkeley.edu/aboutus/people/ndavies;
Jack Faris, PhD
Co-Founder, Data Enabled Life Sciences Alliance
Lead Author, "Communication and Data-Intensive Science in the Beginning of the 21st Century," OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, Volume 15, Number 4, 2011
Previously CEO of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute, President of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, Vice President for University Relations, University of Washington, and Director of Community Strategies for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Wu Feng, PhD
Elizabeth & James E. Turner Fellow and Associate Professor, Departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Tech
Adjunct Professor, Departments of Cancer Biology and Translational Science Institute, School of Medicine, Wake Forest University
Director, Synergy Laboratory
Site Co-Director, NSF Center on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing.
“The Synergy Lab conducts basic and applied research that provides scientists and engineers with scalable and efficient computational tools that enable them to concentrate on their science and engineering rather than on the computer science and engineering. To that end, we explore a breadth of complementary intellectual activities that span the high-performance and enterprise-wide spectrum - from systems software to middleware to applications software to tools - in order to empower cyber-scientists and cyber-engineers of tomorrow. The SyNeRGy Lab is affiliated with the NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). Associated projects include the Green500, Supercomputing in Small Spaces (a.k.a. Green Supercomputing), mpiBLAST (fast sequence analysis), and MyVICE (computer science education for K-12).”
Website: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~feng/, http://synergy.cs.vt.edu/
Geoffrey Fox, PhD
Distinguished Professor of Informatics and Computing and Physics, Indiana University
Director, Digital Science Center
Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, School of Informatics and Computing
“The Digital Science Center (part of the Pervasive Technology Center) focuses on creating an intuitively usable cyberinfrastructure with tremendous capabilities for supporting collaboration and computation. Easy-to-use, human-centered interfaces to cyberinfrastructure created by the Digital Science Center will enable the many thousands of researchers in the public and private sectors to use the capabilities of cyberinfrastructure and accelerate innovation and discovery.”
Website: http://www.soic.indiana.edu/people/profiles/fox-geoffrey-charles.shtml, http://www.pti.iu.edu/dsc
Dmitrij Frishman, PhD
Professor of Bioinformatics, Technical University of Munich
Group leader, Institute for Bioinformatics (MIPS), German National Center for Health and Environment
“The group develops bioinformatics methods and software to support high-throughput biological research at the intersection of structural genomics and proteomics.”
Website: http://frishman.wzw.tum.de/
David Galas, PhD
Principal Scientist, Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute
“Dr. Galas’ laboratory is focused on building new tools and methods for the deciphering of biological complexity and applying them to the study of human disease, including diabetes and associated disorders like neurodegenerative diseases. In collaboration with a number of other groups, the lab is engaged in investigating the complexity of function and inheritance in living systems – this will directly impact human health and medicine at the most fundamental level.”
Website: http://www.pnri.org/research-programs/galas-lab/
Jack Gilbert, PhD
Senior Environmental Microbiologist, Argonne National Laboratory
Adjunct Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
Fellow, Institute of Genomic and Systems Biology
Affiliated, Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences
“The Earth Microbiome Project is a proposed massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to examine microbial communities from their own perspective. Hence we propose to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. We will analyze 200,000 samples from these communities using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and amplicon sequencing to produce a global Gene Atlas describing protein space, environmental metabolic models for each biome, approximately 500,000 reconstructed microbial genomes, a global metabolic model, and a data-analysis portal for visualization of all information.”
Website: http://www.bio.anl.gov/PI/gilbert.html
Brian Glanz
Director, Open Science Federation
“The Open Science Federation is a nonprofit alliance working to improve the conduct and communication of science. OSF makes and supports tools for data sharing, open access publishing, crowdfunding research, citizen science, and the like – to open the process of science. We co-organize events such as workshops that teach scientists to code, hackathons, and discussion series. We also make blogs, sites, and online communities for mission-aligned researchers and organizations such as DELSA. http://delsaconnections.org will facilitate collaboration within DELSA, and it is federated with online communities with shared interests, such as the monthly event series ScienceOnline Bay Area, Seattle, and Vancouver.”
Website: http://opensciencefederation.com
Corinna Gries, PhD
Information Manager, Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, North Temperate Lakes LTER site, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Lead, SYMBIOTA and LBCC projects
North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research studies the ecology of lakes as one of a network of sites established by the National Science Foundation. We are interested in how biophysical setting, climate, and changing land use and cover interact to shape lake characteristics and dynamics over time (past, present, future). SYMBIOTA and LBCC are concerned with developing infrastructure for and digitizing natural history collections.
Website: http://lter.limnology.wisc.edu/profile/corinna-gries
Joe Kemnitz, PhD
Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School
Director, Wisconsin National Primate Research Center
“My laboratory studies mechanisms controlling energy balance and on the consequences of caloric excess or deficit on physiological systems. Current experiments focus on the biology of aging and metabolic problems associated with mid- and late-life. One topic concerns the pathogenesis of obesity and its complications, such as insulin resistance and diabetes mellitus. Pharmacologic interventions to promote maintenance of a healthy body weight and to ameliorate the complications of obesity also are being tested. Another research focus concerns dietary restriction and aging. We are testing the hypothesis that a moderate reduction in caloric intake will slow the rate of aging and ultimately extend lifespan in primates as has been shown for rodents and some other short-lived species. Results thus far indicate that the monkeys on the reduced diet have less body fat, increased sensitivity to insulin and lower insulin levels, improved lipid profiles, and other changes that are consistent with better health. We will extend these assessments in the near future to include cognitive function.”
Website: http://www.physiology.wisc.edu/faculty/kemnitz.html
Eugene Kolker, PhD
Chief Data Officer, Seattle Children’s Hospital
Head, Bioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis Laboratory, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
Co-founder, OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology
“The Kolker Lab at the Seattle Children's Research Institute uses approaches such as genome-wide gene, protein, and metabolite expression, complemented with mutagenesis, biochemical, and physiological experiments. Integration and analysis of these multivariate data will be implemented through comprehensive computations, including bioinformatics, statistics, and mathematical modeling. The deeper knowledge of cellular behavior and responses will enable the researches at the Kolker Lab to develop improvements to human health and address environmental concerns.”
Website: http://kolkerlab.org/
Doron Lancet, PhD
Head, Crown Human Genome Center, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Member, European Molecular Biology Organization
Council Member, Human Genome Organization
“We have studied the genetics of hereditary diseases for the last 15 years. Currently we apply advanced next-generation sequencing (NGS) methodologies i.e. whole human genome sequencing, exome sequencing and sequencing of specific targeted disease-implicated genomic regions. These technologies, in combination with advanced bioinformatic data interpretation, have increased dramatically the identification probability of causal variants for genetic disorders.”
Website: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/molgen/Lancet/home
Trudie Lang, MD
Head, Global Health Network, Global Health Trials, and Global Heath Reviewers
Head, Clinical Trial Research Programme and Group, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford
“Tropical Medicine is a collection of research groups within the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, who are permanently based in Africa and Asia. Our research ranges from clinical studies to behavioural sciences, with capacity building integral to all of our activities.”
Website: http://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/principal-investigators/researcher/trudie-lang
Biaoyang Lin, PhD
Director, Systems Biology Division, Zhejiang-California International Nanosystems Institute (ZCNI), Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Affiliate Professor, ZCNI
“Zhejiang California International NanoSystems Institute (ZCNI) is a first of its kind research and technology innovation platform in China established on June, 2005 at Hangzhou, Zhejiang, which is the joint effort among Zhejiang Provincial Government, Zhejiang University (ZJU), California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), and whose mission is to accelerate the application of nanotechnology in biology, medicine, material, information technology, chemistry etc. ZCNI strives to become the catalyst of the integration of academics and industry,the accelerator of the development
of Zhejiang science and technology and the new engine of the evolution of Zhejiang society and economy.”
Website: http://www.caltechcancer.org/node/55, http://www.zcni.zju.edu.cn/en/main_en.html#
Andrey Lisitsa, DrSc
Head, Laboratory for Bioinformational Technologies, Institute of Biomedical Chemistry, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences
The Lab for Bioinformational Technologies (BioinfoTech Lab) employs the programmatic and algorithmic solutions to support the collaborative decision making (knowledgebase) in the field of molecular biology. BioKnol.org is an example of the social network based on mating the participants by their research interests. GenoCMS is another project which is the Content Management System to create autonomous Web-sites by integrating the data from the public repositories like UniProt, GeneBANK, Short Reads Archive, PRIDE and others, required for a particular research purpose. The BioinfoTech Lab is also working with the large amounts of targeted mass-spectrometry data generated by SRM analysis of biosamples. Currently the Laboratory is actively involved into the Human Proteome Project.
Website: http://www.proteome.ru/en/
Lennart Martens
“The development of several high-throughput Omics fields (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) over the past few years has already resulted in a wealth of data on these various stages in the flow of biological information (from genes to proteins, and on to their metabolic functions). Yet this large amount of information is also rather challenging; indeed, making sense of such volumes of data is no longer straightforward. Initial data processing to obtain results, along with the required quality control of these results, has to be automated. Additionally, storage and retrieval of multi-experiment data also requires a specific informatics infrastructure. On a more global level, dissemination of the (published) data to the scientific community also requires the construction of publicly accessible, domain-specific repositories. Finally, integration of the various results obtained across the different domains remains very much an ongoing research effort in the life sciences.”
Website: http://www.vib.be/en/research/scientists/Pages/Lennart-Martens%20Lab.asp
Folker Meyer, PhD
Computational Biologist, Argonne National Laboratory
Senior Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
“Headquartered in the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, and with facilities that reach across the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, IGSB is an engine for discovery that utilizes the latest approaches in genome analysis, high throughput screening, and biological computation. Founded in 2006, IGSB has grown to eight core faculty with over 50 students and staff, as well as over sixty participating faculty Fellows who are making basic discoveries in the biological sciences. Topics pursued by IGSB investigators are very diverse. A sampling includes: the genetic mechanisms of cancer, the annotation of the human genome, the molecular networks that control development, the role of microbes in the planet’s carbon cycle, mining clinical records to identify disease interactions, mapping signaling networks in human cells, identification of lead molecules for a dozen different diseases, and many other complex biological problems that require systems-wide and genomic information to decode.”
Website: http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~folker/, http://www.igsb.anl.gov/about/
Vural Ozdemir, MD, PhD, DABCP
Associate Professor, Centre of Genomics and Policy, Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University
Editor-in-Chief, OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology
“Located within the McGill University/Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, the Centre of Genomics and Policy (CGP) is at the crossroads of the legal, medical and public policy fields. The CGP promotes prospective structuring and guidance for both research in genomic health sciences and its applications.
Within a multidisciplinary perspective and in collaboration with national and international partners, the CGP analyzes the socio-ethical and legal norms influencing multiple aspects of the promotion, prevention and protection of human health. “
Website: http://www.genomicsandpolicy.org/MembreInfo.cfm?Id=497&langue=1
Sanjeeva Srivastava, PhD
Group Leader, Proteomics Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay India (IITB)
Visiting Scientist, Biodesign Institute, Arizona
Website: www.bio.iitb.ac.in/~sanjeeva/
Michael Sullivan, MD
Associate Director of Health Sciences, Internet2
“Internet2 operates an advanced nationwide fiber-optic network operating at 100 Gigabits per second. Dr. Sullivan works with biomedical researchers, health care organizations, and government agencies like NIH, CDC, NSF, DOE, and FCC to promote cyberinfrastructure support for advanced applications in the life sciences.”
Website: http://events.internet2.edu/speakers/speakers.php?go=people&id=2703
Paul Wilmes
ATTRACT Fellow, University of Luxembourg
“The LCSB is accelerating biomedical research by closing the link between systems biology and medical research. Collaboration between biologists, medical doctors, computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians is offering new insights in complex systems like cells, organs, and organisms. These insights are essential for understanding principal mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and for developing new tools in diagnostics and therapy .”
Website: http://wwwen.uni.lu/lcsb/people/paul_wilmes