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Senior Scientist,
Weizmann Institute of Science |
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Uri Alon did his PhD in theoretical physics
at the Weizmann Institute, on statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics.
He switched to experimental biology during his postdoc at Princeton,
studying robustness in bacterial chemotaxis. Since 2000, his lab at
Weizmann studies gene regulation networks experimentally and theoretically,
using E. coli and mammalian cell-lines as model systems. His research
employs accurate, high temporal-resolution measurement of gene expression
from living cells and mathematical modelling to discover the design
principles of biological networks. This led to the definition of 'network
motifs', recurring circuit patterns in biological networks, and experimental
demonstration of their information-processing functions. |
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Eric Green received his M.D.
and Ph.D. in 1987 from Washington University, after which he pursued
residency training in clinical pathology and postdoctoral training
in genomics at the same institution. In 1992, he was appointed assistant
professor of pathology and genetics at Washington University. In 1994,
he moved to the Intramural Program of the National Human Genome Research
Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health. In addition
to his role as Chief of the Genome Technology Branch and Director
of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center, Dr. Green was appointed to
the position of Scientific Director of NHGRI in 2002. |
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Dr. Hood’s research has focused on
the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology, and genomics. His
professional career began at Caltech where he and his colleagues pioneered
four instruments—the DNA gene sequencer and synthesizer, and
the protein synthesizer and sequence—which comprise the technological
foundation for contemporary molecular biology. In particular, the
DNA sequencer has revolutionized genomics by allowing the rapid automated
sequencing of DNA, which played a crucial role in contributing to
the successful mapping of the human genome during the 1990s. In 1992,
Dr. Hood moved to the University of Washington as founder and Chairman
of the cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology. In
2000, he co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle,
Washington to pioneer systems approaches to biology and medicine.
Most recently, Dr. Hood's lifelong contributions to biotechnology
have earned him the prestigious 2003 Lemelson–MIT Prize for
Innovation and Invention. He was also awarded the 2002 Kyoto Prize
in Advanced Technology and the 1987 Lasker Prize for his studies on
the mechanism of immune diversity. He has published more than 500
peer-reviewed papers, received 12 patents, and has co-authored textbooks
in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, and
is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical
Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute
of Medicine. Dr. Hood has also played a role in founding numerous
biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix,
Darwin and Rosetta. |
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Dr. David Lipman is currently the Director
of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which
is a division of the National Library of Medicine within the National
Institutes of Health. NCBI was created by Congress in 1988 to do basic
research in computational biology, and to develop computational tools,
databases and information systems for molecular biology. After medical
training, Dr. Lipman joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the
National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
as a Research Fellow. In his research on computational tools, he developed
the most widely used methods for searching biological sequence databases.
There are thousands of citations to Dr. Lipman’s methods in
papers which have used them to discover biological functions for unknown
sequences and which have thereby advanced the understanding of the
molecular basis of human disease. Since 1989, Dr. Lipman has been
the Director of the NCBI, a leading research center in computational
biology, the creators of PubMed, and one of the most heavily used
sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information.
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Matthias Mann is a pioneer of mass spectrometric
methods in proteomics. He was on the team that originally developed
electrospray mass spectrometry at Yale University, an achievement
that gained a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for John
Fenn. Dr Mann originally studied Mathematics and Physics and was
a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg
before becoming full professor in bioinformatics at the University
of Southern Denmark in Odense. His research group is further developing
proteomic technology, in particular tools for interaction analysis
by quantitative methods. His laboratory recently described Stable
Isotope Labeling by Amino acids in Cell culture (SILAC) as key advance
in quantitative proteomics. Recent reports by the group in organellar
proteomics include characterization of the human centrosome, the
mitochondrion and the nucleolus. The group has also used quantitative
proteomics to determine the dynamics of human signalling pathways. |
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Denis Noble is the Burdon Sanderson Professor
of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, a Chair financed
by British Heart Foundation. His research is focussed on using computer
models of biological organs and systems to interpret function through
from the molecular to the whole body levels. With its international
collaborators, this team has used supercomputers to create the first
virtual organ, the virtual heart. As Secretary-General of IUPS, he
played a major role in launching the Human Physiome Project, an international
project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological
models necessary to interpret the genome. |
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Svante Paabo was born in 1955 in Stockholm,
Sweden. He studies Egyptology, History of Science and Medicine at
the University of Uppsala where he obtained a PhD in molecular immunology.
As a graduate student he began experimenting with the extraction and
cloning of DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies. As a postdoctoral fellow
at UC Berkeley he applied PCR to the retrieval of DNA sequences from
archaeological remains, and with this founded the field of molecular
archaeology. The techniques developed since by Dr Paabo's group have
been used to study specimens in zoological collections as well as
the phylogeny and population genetics of extinct organisms. Svante
Paabo is a cofounder of the interdisciplinary Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which unites approaches
from the natural and social sciences on questions concerning the evolutionary
origins and unique abilities of humans. His most recent work focuses
on genomic comparisons of humans and apes, for example in terms of
gene expression patterns in the brain and the genetic changes that
may underlie the human ability for articulate speech. |
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Anna Tramontano was trained as a physicist
but she soon became fascinated by the complexity of biology and by
the promises of computational biology. She worked at the Department
of Biochemistry and Biophysics of UCSF where she collaborated in the
development of the very popular molecular graphics software Insight.
Later she was a staff scientist in the Biocomputing Programme of the
EMBL, where she studied the sequence structure relationship in immunoglobulin
molecules. In 1990 she moved back to Italy in the Merck Research Laboratories
near Rome, where she was involved in protein structure modeling and
design, and in drug and vaccine discovery and development. She recently
returned to the academic world and is now Chair Professor of Biochemistry
in "La Sapienza" University in Rome where she continues
to pursue her scientific interests on protein structure prediction
and analysis. |
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