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| 2019 Overton Prize Winner: Christophe Dessimoz |
2019 ISCB Overton Prize: Christophe Dessimoz
Christophe Dessimoz, SNSF Professor, University of Lausanne; Associate Professor, University College London; Group Leader, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The Overton Prize recognizes the research, education, and service accomplishments of early to mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcher and a founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Christophe Dessimoz is being recognized as the 2019 winner of the Overton Prize.
Christophe Dessimoz is a SNSF Professor at the University of Lausanne; an Associate Professor at the University College London; a Group Leader at the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics. Christophe obtained his Master in Biology (2003) and PhD in Computer Science (2009) from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After a postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge (UK), he joined University College London as Lecturer (2013) and was promoted to a Reader in 2015. He joined the University of Lausanne as a SNSF Professor in 2015. With 70 papers published, Christophe has made varied and sustained contributions to bioinformatics.
He is renowned for his contributions to and subsequently management of the OMA resource providing high quality information on orthologous proteins. OMA is a very highly regarded resource with important applications in protein function prediction.
Another important thread across Christophe’s work has been his pursuit of benchmarking. Christophe’s rigorous approach to benchmarking had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference, sequence alignment, and gene ontology.
ISCB will present award winners Bonnie Berger (Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award), Christophe Dessimoz (Overton Prize), William Stafford Noble (Innovator Award) and Barbara Bryant (Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award), at ISMB/ECCB 2019 (www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2019), which is being held in Basel, Switzerland, July 21-25. Berger, Dessimoz, and Noble will present keynote addresses during the conference.
Full bibliographical articles profiling the award recipients will be available in the ISMB/ECCB 2019 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in OUP Bioinformatics, and F1000 Research ISCB Community Journal.
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