Sydney
Brenner
Molecular Science Institute, Salk Institute http://www.molsci.org Sydney Brenner, founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute
and distinguished research professor, Salk Institute.
Brenner is one of the leading pioneers of genetics and molecular
biology and shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine with John Sulston of the Sanger Center at Cambridge
University and H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Among his many notable discoveries, Brenner
established the existence of messenger RNA. His research
with Caenorhabditis elegans garnered insights into aging,
nerve cell function, and apoptosis. Most recently, Brenner
has been studying vertebrate gene and genome evolution.
His work in this area has resulted in new ways of analyzing
gene sequences, which has resulted in a new understanding
of the evolution of vertebrates.
David
Haussler
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California
at Santa Cruz http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~haussler/ David Haussler, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator
and professor of computer and information sciences, University
of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler's research interests
include: genomics, bioinformatics, machine learning, statistical
decision theory, pattern recognition, neural networks, algorithms
and complexity. He is a fellow of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the ACM, IMS, AAAS,
and the IEEE. He is a past chairman of the Steering Committee
for the Computational Learning Theory Conferences, a member
of the Working Group on Machine Learning of the International
Federation for Information Processing, an Associate Editor
for the Journal of Computational Biology, and is an action
editor for the journal Machine Learning.
Yoshihide
Hayashizaki
RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center http://www.gsc.riken.go.jp/e/group/themegenomeE.html Yoshihide Hayashizaki, project director of Genome Exploration
Research Group, Genomic Sciences Center, RIKEN. Hayashizaki's
research has covered a number of areas in genomic research,
most notably the establishment of a Mouse Genome Encyclopedia
at RIKEN. From 1988 to 1992, he worked at the National Cardiovascular
Center Research Institute in Osaka, where he developed the
Restriction Landmark Genome Scanning (RLGS) System. In 1992,
Hayashizaki was appointed Project Director for the RIKEN Genome
Project in 1995. Hayashizaki currently leads a research group
that is working on analyzing gene transcriptional networks
using the Mouse Genome Encyclopedia.
W.
James Kent
University of California, Santa Cruz
Winner of the 2003 ISCB Overton Prize http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~kent/ W.
James Kent, Assistant Research Scientist at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. W. James Kent is best known
as the researcher who “saved” the human genome project,
a feat chronicled in the New York Times. With little more
than a month before the company Celera was to present a complete
draft of the human genome to the White House in 2000, Kent
wrote GigAssembler, a program that produced the first full
working draft assembly of the human genome, which kept the
data freely available in the public domain. Kent’s main
scientific goal has been to understand gene regulation by
building bioinformatics tools such as his Intronerator system
for exploring the genome of C. elegans; the program WABA,
one of the first pair-HMMs for alignment of genomic DNA of
two species; Improbiser, an expectation-maximization method
to discover and cluster potential transcription factor binding
sites; and the popular BLAT, which rapidly searches full genomes
at both the DNA and protein levels.
John
Mattick
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland http://www.imb.uq.edu.au/
John Mattick, Director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience,
University of Queensland. Mattick's work covers an interest
in genomes and what new understandings can be uncovered from
the genomes of organisms that have been completely sequenced.
He studies bacterial genomes and higher organisms, specifically
their introns. Currently he is investigating alternative splicing
and editing of genes and how introns play a part in this process.
David
Sankoff
University of Ottawa
Winner of the 2003 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award http://www.dms.umontreal.ca/Professeurs/sankoff/
David Sankoff, Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics
at the University of Ottawa and a member of the Centre de
Recherches Mathématiques at the Université de
Montréal. Over
the past 30 years, David Sankoff has formulated and contributed
to many of the fundamental problems in computational biology.
He introduced the quadratic version of the Needleman-Wunsch
algorithm, developed the first statistical test for alignments,
initiated the study of limit behavior of random sequences,
and formulated the multiple alignment problem. With Robert
Cedergren, he developed algorithms for folding and alignment
of RNAs, and studied evolution of the genetic code. David
has developed models for horizontal gene transfer, and methods
for optimization of trees and rapid bootstraps. He generalized
the nearest-neighbor exchange heuristic, developed consensus
and supertree problems, analyzed computational complexity
of several phylogeny problems, and developed a general technique
for phylogenetic invariants. Over the last 15 years he has
focused on the evolution of genomes as the result of chromosomal
rearrangement, introducing genomic edit distances, gene order
phylogenies, algorithms for analyzing genome duplication and
hybridization, and statistical analysis of gene clusters.
He is also well-known in linguistics for his methods of studying
grammatical variation and change in speech communities, the
quantification of discourse analysis, and production models
of bilingual speech.
Ron
Shamir
Tel-Aviv University http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~rshamir/ Ron Shamir, professor of computer science, Tel-Aviv University.
Shamir's fields of interest include bioinformatics, graph
algorithms, and optimization. Along with teaching a number
of courses, Shamir serves on a number of editorial boards.
Some current projects in Shamir's group include clustering
gene expression data, computational tools for analysis of
genetic networks and pathways, designing degenerate primers,
and novel applications of DNA Chips.
Michael
Waterman
University of Southern California http://www-hto.usc.edu/people/Waterman.html
Michael Waterman, professor of Mathematics, Computer Science
and Biological Science, University of Southern California.
Waterman's work focuses on the creation and application of
mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular
biology, particularly to DNA, RNA, and protein sequence data.
He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for
sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for
physical mapping. He is a founding editor of Journal of Computational
Biology, is on the editorial board of seven journals, and
is author of the text Introduction to Computational Biology:
Maps, Sequences and Genomes.
Sydney
Brenner
David
Haussler
Yoshihide
Hayashizaki
W.
James Kent
John
Mattick
David
Sankoff
Ron
Shamir
Michael
Waterman
