Picture: 2012 Accomplishment By A Senior Scientist Award Prize Winner, Gunnar von Heijne. Photo by Max Brouwer

ISCB Congratulates 2012 Senior Scientist Award Winner

The International Society For Computational Biology (ISCB) has awarded its Accomplishment By A Senior Scientist Award to Gunnar von Heijne, director of the Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research in Sweden and professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Stockholm University.

The Senior Scientist Award recognises members of the community who have made major contributions to the field of computational biology. As a winner, von Heijne will give a keynote address the Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology in July in Long Beach, California (ISMB; www.iscb.org/ismb2012).

von Heijne gained a PhD in theoretical physics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in 1980. By his own admission, he stumbled into the field of signal peptides while looking for interesting problems to work on. He soon revolutionised the field with the discovery of identifying patterns in signal peptides. He then developed an algorithm that could predict whether proteins have a signal peptide. Since then, he has focused on membranes and how proteins move across them. In the process, he has made the transition from theoretician to experimentalist. "I realised that wetlab science is great fun,” he says.

President of the ISCB, Burkhard Rost, says von Heijne is a worthy winner. "He is one of the few who completely changed the field using computational methods and also had an experimental lab running,” says Rost. "I am very happy that he gets this award.”

Alfonso Valencia, chair of the ISCB awards committee, agrees. "The computational tools he has developed are among the most quoted in bioinformatics,” says Valencia. "He is a leading figure in the field and this is our way of recognising his contribution.”

von Heijne says the award has taken him somewhat by surprise. "It was completely unexpected so I am very happy to receive it,” he says.

For information about this award and its past winners, please visit www.iscb.org/iscb-awards/accomplishment-senior-scientist-award

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Picture: 2012 Accomplishment By A Senior Scientist Award Prize Winner, Gunnar von Heijne. Photo by Max Brouwer