Bioinformatics

Lynn B. Jorde, PhDhas been on the faculty of the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, since 1979 and holds the Mark and Kathie Miller Presidential Endowed Chair in Human Genetics. He was appointed Chair of the Department of Human Genetics in September 2009. Dr. Jorde's laboratory has published scientific articles on human genetic variation, high-altitude adaptation, the genetic basis of human limb malformations, and the genetics of common diseases such as hypertension, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Jorde is the lead author of Medical Genetics , a textbook that is now in its fifth edition and translated into multiple foreign languages. He is the co-recipient of the 2008 Award for Excellence in Education from the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). He served two 3-year terms on the Board of Directors of ASHG and, in 2011, he was elected as president of ASHG. In 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Marieke L. Kuijjer, PhDis a Group Leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM, a Nordic EMBL partner), University of Oslo, Norway, where she runs the Computational Biology and Systems Medicine group. She obtained her doctorate in the laboratory of Dr. Pancras Hogendoorn in the Department of Pathology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. After this, she continued her scientific training as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. John Quackenbush at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, during which she won a career development award and a postdoctoral fellowship. Dr. Kuijjer's research focuses on solving fundamental biological questions through the development of new methods in computational and systems biology and on implementing these techniques to better understand gene regulation in cancer. Dr. Kuijjer serves on the editorial board of Cancer Research .

David H. Mathews, MD, PhDis a professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and also of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA. He also serves as the Associate Director of the University of Rochester's Center for RNA Biology. His involvement in education includes directing the Biophysics PhD program and teaching a course in Python programming and algorithms for doctoral students without a programming background. His group studies RNA biology and develops methods for RNA secondary structure prediction and molecular modeling of three-dimensional structure. His group developed and maintains RNAstructure, a widely used software package for RNA structure prediction and analysis.

Sean D. Mooney, PhDhas spent his career as a researcher and group leader in biomedical informatics. He now leads Research IT for UW Medicine and is leading efforts to support and build clinical research informatic platforms as its first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) and as a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Previous to being appointed as CRIO, he was an Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. As an Assistant Professor, he was appointed in Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine and was the founding Director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core. In 1997, he received his BS with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received his PhD from the University of California in San Francisco in 2001, then pursued his postdoctoral studies under an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellowship at Stanford University.

Stephen J. Mooney, PhDis an Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. He developed the CANVAS system for collecting data from Google Street View imagery as a graduate student, and his research focuses on contextual influences on physical activity and transport-related injury. He's a methods geek at heart.

Hunter N.B. Moseley, PhDis an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA. He is also the Informatics Core Director within the Resource Center for Stable Isotope Resolved Metabolomics, Associate Director for the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, and a member of the Markey Cancer Center. His research interests include developing computational methods, tools, and models for analyzing and interpreting many types of biological and biophysical data that enable new understanding of biological systems and related disease processes. His formal education spans multiple disciplines including chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and biochemistry, with expertise in algorithm development, mathematical modeling, structural bioinformatics, and systems biochemistry, particularly in the development of automated analyses of nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry data as well as knowledge–data integration.

Yanay Ofran, PhDis a Professor and head of the Laboratory of Functional Genomics and Systems Biology at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. His research focuses on biomolecular recognition and its role in health and disease. Professor Ofran is also the founder of Biolojic Design, a biopharmaceutical company that uses artificial intelligence approaches to design epitope-specific antibodies. He is also the co-founder of Ukko, a biotechnology company that uses computational tools to design safe proteins for the food and agriculture sectors.

Joseph N. Paulson, PhDis a Statistical Scientist within Genentech's Department of Biostatistics, San Francisco, CA, USA, working on designing clinical trials and biomarker discovery. Previously, he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He graduated with a PhD in Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. As a statistician and computational biologist, his interests include clinical trial design, biomarker discovery, development of computational methods for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data while accounting for technical artifacts, and the microbiome.

Sadhna Phanse, MScis a Bioinformatics Analyst at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. She has been active in the field of proteomics since 2006 as a member of the Emili research group. Her current work involves the use of bioinformatics methods to investigate biological systems and molecular association networks in human cells and model organisms.

John Quackenbush, PhDis Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA. He also holds appointments in the Channing Division of Network Medicine of Brigham and Women's Hospital and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is a recognized expert in computational and systems biology and its applications to the study of a wide range of human diseases and the factors that drive those diseases and their responses to therapy. Dr. Quackenbush has long been an advocate for open science and reproducible research. As a founding member and past president of the Functional Genomics Data Society (FGED), he was a developer of the Minimal Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) and other data-reporting standards. Dr. Quackenbush was honored by President Barack Obama in 2013 as a White House Open Science Champion of Change.