Gary D. Bader, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Gary D. Bader, PhD, works on biological network analysis and pathway information resources as an Assistant Professor at the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR) at the University of Toronto since 2006. He completed post-doctoral work in the group of Chris Sander in the Computational Biology Center (cBio) at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York from 2002 to 2006. He did his Ph.D. in the lab of Christopher Hogue in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and completed a B.Sc. in Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal in 1997.
As a PhD student, Gary developed the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND), one of the first of dozens of molecular interaction databases. He was one of the first people to apply graph theoretical techniques from computer science to the analysis of biological networks, for instance developing one of the first network clustering algorithms for detecting protein complexes. Gary has worked on computational prediction of protein-protein interactions and protein interaction network evolution, yeast genetic interaction network statistical analysis, the development of biological network databases and standard exchange formats.
In addition, Gary plays an active role in the development of open-source biological pathway and network data exchange formats (PSI-MI, BioPAX), databases (cPath, BIND, Cancer Cell Map, Pathway Commons) and visualization and analysis software (Cytoscape). See http://baderlab.org
David Altshuler, PhD, MD, Cambridge, MA, USA
Founding member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics
Deputy Director and Chief Academic Officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Endocrinologist and human geneticist David Altshuler is a founding member of the Broad Institute and serves as director of the Broad’s Program in Medical and Population Genetics, as well as the Institute’s first Deputy Director and Chief Academic Officer. David is one of the world’s leading scientists in the study of human genetic variation and its application to disease, using tools and information from the Human Genome Project. He has been a lead investigator in The SNP Consortium, the International HapMap Project, and the 1,000 Genomes Project - public-private partnerships that have created public maps of human genome sequence variation as a foundation for disease research.
His work has contributed to the understanding of gene variants that influence the risk of common conditions, including type 2 diabetes, blood cholesterol, prostate cancer, systemic lupus erythematosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. These studies provide new clues about the mechanisms that cause these diseases, and more generally, provide a blueprint for analyzing the role of genetic variations in human health.
David is also a professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School, and in the department of molecular biology at the Center for Human Genetic Research, as well as the Diabetes Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Larry Hunter, PhD, University of Colorado, Denver, USA
Director Center for Computational Pharmacology Computational Bioscience Program
Founding President of the International Society for Computational Biology
Lawrence Hunter, PhD, is the Director of the Computational Bioscience Program and of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and a Professor in the departments of Pharmacology, Computer Science (Boulder), and Preventive Medicine and Biometrics. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1989, and then spent more than 10 years at the National Institutes of Health, ending as the Chief of the Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics Section at the National Cancer Institute.
He inaugurated two of the most important academic bioinformatics conferences, ISMB and PSB, and was the founding President of the International Society for Computational Biology.
Larry's research interests span a wide range of areas, from cognitive science to rational drug design. His primary focus recently has been the integration of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning techniques and their application to interpreting data generated by high throughput molecular biology.
