ISCB Welcomes
Six
New Board Members
The ISCB welcomes
six new members to its board of directors. Steven Brenner, Rita
Casadio, Roderic Guigo, Goran Neshich, Shoba Ranganathan, and Burkhard
Rost were voted in during an annual Board meeting, held August 5,
2002, in conjunction with ISMB 2002. The new Board members were
elected based on nominations gathered from the membership. The new
members were elected to three-year terms as four other members completed
their service to the Society.
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Steven
Brenner |
I am pleased
to welcome the new Board members. They demonstrate the depth, scientifically
and geographically, of the Society as a whole, and will particularly
enhance the voice of the Society in their regions while providing
an international representation on the Board of Directors,
said ISCB President Phil Bourne.
Steven E.
Brenner, Ph.D., is assistant professor and leader of a computational
genomics research group at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research interests include computational approaches for structural
genomics and sequence analysis, and the use of both of these to
infer-molecular function. Brenner was educated and trained at Harvard
University, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Cambridge
University, and Stanford University. More about his research group
may be found at compbio.berkeley.edu.
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Rita
Casadio |
Rita Casadio,
Ph.D., is a professor of biophysics and group leader of the
biocomputing unit at the Inter-departmental Centre for Biotechnological
Researches at the University of Bologna, Italy. Casadio has worked
on biophysics in laboratories both in the US and Germany. Her current
research focuses on theoretical and experimental membrane and protein
biophysics. Presently she is interested in computer modeling of
relevant biological processes, such as protein folding. This she
applies to her research on the application of neural networks to
the prediction of secondary structure of proteins from their residue
sequences. More about her research may be found at www.biocomp.unibo.it.
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Roderick
Guigo |
Roderic Guigo,
Ph.D., is a researcher at the Institut Municipal dInvestigació
Mèdica, an Associate Professor at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, and coordinator of the Bioinformatics Program at the newly
created Center for Genomic Regultaion in Barcelona. Guigo obtained
his Ph.D. in 1988 from the Universitat de Barcelona where he worked
at the Department of Statistics with advisor, Jordi Ocaña.
Guigo conducted postdoctoral research as a fellow with Temple F.
Smith at Harvards Molecular Biology Computer Research Resource.
Ongoing work with Smith includes several sequence analysis projects.
Guigo continued his postdoctoral research with Los Alamos National
Laboratorys Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group where
he worked on genome analysis with James W. Fickett. Following this,
Guigo returned to the Universitat de Barcelona where he worked in
the Department of Statistics. More about his research may be found
at www1.imim.es/main/research.html.
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Goran
Neshich |
Goran Neshich,
Ph.D., is a structural bioinformatics group leader at the Brazilian
Enterprise for Research in Agriculture (EMBRAPA), Informatica Agropeciam,
Compines, Brazil. Neshich started his work in structural bioinformatics
while studying structure and function relationship of the photosynthetic
reaction center during his graduate work done with Don DeVault at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He conducted his
postdoctoral research with Barry Honig at Columbia University. Neshich
is the principal author of STING and the STING Millennium Suite,
a popular software application for presentation of macromolecular
interactions, structure analysis, and visualization. STING is accessible
from the Protien Data Bank (PDB), www.pdb.org.
He is continuing to develop tools for comprehensive presentation
of physical-chemical properties of proteins (Protein Dossier) and
applying those to generate structure/function descriptors. His latest
initiative is developing the Protein Dossier to be suitable for
presentation of results obtained and used in drug and drug target
identification and chemogenomics. More about his research may be
found at www.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br.
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Shoba
Ranganathan |
Shoba Ranganathan,
Ph.D., is an associate professor of biochemistry and biological
sciences at the National University of Singapore. Ranganathans
research focuses on: protein structure comparison, prediction and
modeling and function prediction; creation and mining of boutique
databases for computational biology and immunology; alternate splice
variants and intron-exon evolution; comparative genomics and organism-based
transcription regulation; and developing Grid computing applications
in bioinformatics. Ranganathan has served as the Vice President
of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) since January
2000; and as the Secretary of S* Life Science Informatics Alliance
since July 2000. More about her research may be found at surya.bic.nus.edu.sg/shoba.
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Burkhard
Rost |
Burkhard
Rost, Ph.D., is an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular
biophysics, Columbia University, New York, USA. Rosts research
focuses on the prediction of protein structure and function by combining
means from simple statistics to artificial intelligence and evolutionary
information. His group is currently also working on the following
projects: to improve and extend the EValuation of Automatic protein
structure prediction (EVA) server to continuously evaluate structure
prediction; to improve methods to predict secondary structure and
solvent accessibility; to build a database of predictions for entire
genomes; and to predict structural domains from sequence. More generally,
his group attempts to shift focus from predicting structure to predicting
function. More about his research may be found at cubic.bioc.columbia.edu.
The ISCB Board
of Directors consists of 30 members who lead committees on awards,
conferences, education, finance, nominations, and publications.
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