The theme of our panel discussion this year will be Career Paths in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. We are inviting panelists from academia, industry and other sectors to talk about their experiences and discuss questions from the audience.

Panelists

Philip E. Bourne

University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Philip Bourne is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, Co-director of the Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute and the Keck Graduate Institute. He is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology. He is an elected fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology, on the Advisory Board of Biopolymers and on the Editorial Boards of Proteins: Structure Function and Bioinformatics, Biosilico and IEEE Trends in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and a long standing member of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health panels responsible for reviewing proposals relating to biological infrastructure and bioinformatics. He is a past member of the US National Committee for Crystallography, past chairman of the International Union of Crystallography Computing Commission IUCrCC and past chairman of the American Crystallography Association (ACA) Computing Committee. Recent awards include the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement 2004 and the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award 2002.

Bourne's professional interests focus on bioinformatics and structural bioinformatics in particular. This implies algorithms, metalanguages, biological databases, biological query languages and visualization with special interest in evolution, cell signaling and apoptosis. He has published over 200 papers and 4 books, one of which sold over 120,000 copies. He has co-founded 4 companies: ViSoft Inc., Protein Vision Inc., a company distributing independent films for free and most recently SciVee.

Richard Wintle

The Centre for Applied Genomics (TCAG), Toronto, ON, Canada

Dr. Wintle completed a PhD in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto, studying the organization of antibody heavy chain genes. His postdoctoral work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health involved the study of neurotransmitter signaling in the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans. He then spent six years with with two related biotechnology companies, most recently as Director of Operations. Responsibilities included laboratory operations, intellectual property portfolio and scientific project management, including managing a multi-million dollar research initiative on the genetics of inflammatory and other complex diseases.

Since January, 2006, he has been with The Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. TCAG is core facility employing over 70 people, and providing services in genomic laboratory experimentation, project consultation and bioinformatic and computational support to over a thousand laboratories in Ontario, the rest of Canada, and worldwide.

Jong Bhak

Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC), Daejeon, Korea

Dr. Jong completed an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at Aberdeen University, UK in the year of 1994. And, he finished the Ph.D degree in Bioinformatics with Tim Hubbard (MRC-CPE) & Cyrus Chothia (MRC-LMB). His postdoctoral work was at MRC centre, Cambridge University, UK with Cyrus Chothia. He has also worked as a research fellow for Harvard Medical School and the European Bioinformatics Institute. He then returned to Korea and worked as an associate professor in the Biosystems Department of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Since March, 2005, he has been working as Director at the Korean BioInformation Center (KOBIC) in the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB). KOBIC, a national center for bioinformatics, is devoting to all the aspects of bioinformatics research and development activities by the cooperation of experts of multiple research groups.

His current interests include structural analysis of protein-protein interactome, network biology, bioinformatics research of gerontology and stem cell biology, protein-ligand interaction, SNP analysis, molecular anthropology, and integrative bioinformatics analysis pipeline.

Alfonso Valencia

Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

Alfonso Valencia is a biologist by training. He has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry by the U. Autonoma (Madrid). Since 1986 he has been working in the field of Bioinformatics (initially combined with experimental approaches). From 1988 to 1994 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratoy (EMBL) in Heidelberg in the group of Chris Sander, studying the evolution of protein function with a combination of sequence and structure based approaches. In 1994 he started his own group in Madrid, the Protein Design Group (PDG). The PDG is currently composed of more than 28 scientists, engineers and technicians. Alfonso Valencia a research professor at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), the coordinator of the Spanish network of bioinformatics, former VP and founder member of the International Society of Computational Biology, and Executive Editor of the journal Bioinformatics.

Alfonso Valencia's main scientific interest is associated to the use of genomics and proteomics for the study of molecular evolution and for the development of new biotechnological resources, what requires the development of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology methods.His group has contributed to the development of various bioinformatics systems, and collaborates actively with experimental biologists in the study of different molecular systems, such as Chemokine receptors, bacterial cell division proteins, and small GTPases. The scientific activity of his group includes the analysis and comparison of genomes, prediction of protein structure and function, analysis of protein interactions, and more recently the extraction of information from scientific text.