Biography
I originally trained in biochemistry but moved quickly into bioinformatics, publishing my first set of programs (Pairwise and Searchwise) as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. I benefitted greatly from spending time in Adrian Krainer's Lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Toby Gibson at EMBL Heidelberg and Iain Campbell's lab at Oxford. I did my PhD with Richard Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and St John's College Cambridge, and have collaborated with him since. In 2000 I joined EMBL-EBI as a Team Leader, became a Senior Scientist in EMBL in 2003 and was appointed Associate Director in 2012. I was involved in the Human genome project (both Draft and Finished) 1999-2003, the Mouse genome project, and many others. I lead the analysis of ENCODE for both the 1% pilot (published in 2007) and the scale up (published in 2012). I contributed to the Pfam database, and co-founded both the Ensembl and Reactome databases, both of which have moved to new direct leadership. Through my Associate Directorship of the EBI I continue to be involved in these projects along with many others. I was involved in the creation of a number of widely used bioinformatics tools, either directly (Genewise, 2000), or in collaboration with students and postdocs, eg Exonerate (with Guy Slater), Enredo (Javier Herrero), Pecan (Benedict Paten), Velvet (Daniel Zerbino) and CRAM (Markus Hsi-yang Fritz, Rasko Lenionen and Vadim Zalunin). In 2003 I was awarded the Francis Crick Lecture In 2012 I was also elected fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO).
Abstract
Genomics and molecular biology; a data intensive science for the 21st Century
Molecular biology has transitioned from being a detailed experimental science in the 1980s and 1990s to being a data intensive science in the 21st Century. Molecular biology techniques, in particular DNA sequencing, produce large amounts of heterogeneous data. This data, when analysed appropriately, can lead to remarkable insights into human disease processes, agricultural science and ecology. In this talk I will outline some of the technology drivers in this science and describe the need for a robust, scaleable information infrastructure, spanning both technical and scientific domains.
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