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Volume 9, Issue 2
President's Letter
Welcome to ISMB 2006!
Student Council Events
Mathieu Blanchette
Overton Prize
Michael Waterman
Senior Scientist
Accomplishment Award
One Year of
PLoS Computational Biology
PLoS CB Education
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BioLINK and BioCreAtIvE:
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ISCB Officer and Student
Council Leadership Elections
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Dr. Mathieu Blanchette
Named as ISCB 2006
Overton Prize Winner!
Submitted by Merry Maisel, freelance science
writer
The
International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) awards the
2006 Overton Prize to Mathieu Blanchette, assistant professor in
the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montréal.
The prize is awarded at the ISCB annual meeting, Intelligent Systems
for Molecular Biology, held in Fortaleza, Brazil, on August 8, 2006
when Blanchette delivers the annual Overton keynote lecture entitled
"What mammalian genomes tell us about our ancestors, and vice
versa."
"Mathieu Blanchette is responsible for fundamental, highly
cited contributions in several areas of bioinformatics," says
Professor Thomas Lengauer of the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik,
who is chair of the ISCB Awards Committee.
"His doctoral thesis contained perhaps the first reasonable
algorithm for gene-order phylogeny, based on a solution to the breakpoint
median problem, and it also elaborated the now-famous concept of
phylogenetic footprinting. As a postdoctoral researcher, he played
a central role in working out algorithms for reconstructing ancestral
mammalian genomes. His most recent work continues his interest in
the inference of evolutionary scenarios and gene regulation. And
he has been active in the bioinformatics community since his student
days, presenting papers at the Computing and Combinatorics conferences
and the Research in Computational Molecular Biology meetings, among
others. He is currently organizing several workshops and conferences,
has attracted many students to his new lab, and has been highly
successful in obtaining funding in a competitive environment."
From 1994 through 1997, Blanchette was an undergraduate in the Mathematics
and Computer Science departments of the Université de Montréal.
After graduating, he did an M.Sc. there as well, writing a thesis
on breakpoint phylogeny under the direction of David Sankoff. He
then went to the University of Washington, obtaining a Ph.D. in
Computer Science (2002) under the supervision of Martin Tompa. He
spent the next year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for
Biomolecular Science and Engineering of the University of California
at Santa Cruz, where he worked with David Haussler. He took up his
current position at McGill in 2003.
Blanchette says, "Chris Overton was one of the first explorers
of the world of bioinformatics, before the name even existed, and
he opened the area to young people like me. I am immensely grateful
for the work he did and greatly honored to receive this award, created
in his memory after his untimely death in 2000." The award
is given annually to a scientist in the early to middle stage of
his or her career who has contributed significantly to computational
biology through research, education, service, or a combination of
the three.
For an abstract of Blanchette's keynote address, please see
ismb2006.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br/keynotes.html#blanchette.
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