Dan Gusfield, UC Davis

Bio: Dr. Gusfield's is a professor in the department of computer science at University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from UC Berkeley, working with Richard Karp, and was an Assistant Professor at Yale University from 1980 to 1986. He moved to UC Davis in July 1986. Since then, he has mostly addressed problems in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He first addressed questions about building evolutionary trees, and then problems in molecular sequence analysis. He presently focuses mostly on optimization problems related to population genetics and population-scale genomics. Two particular problems are haplotype inference and inferences about historical recombination. His book, "Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology" has helped to define the intersection of computer science and bioinformatics. It has been translated into Russian, and a South Asian edition has recently been published. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Biology, and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

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Eugene Koonin, National Center for Biotechnology Information

Bio: Dr. Koonin is a Senior Investigator in the Computational Biology Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Department of Biology, Moscow State University in Molecular Biology. He is interested in understanding the evolution of life. Dr. Koonin and his research group employ existing and new methods of computational biology to perform research in three main areas: i) Empirical comparative and evolutionary genomics - comparison of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes with the aim of predicting gene functions, constructing evolutionary scenarios for particular gene families and functional categories, and deciphering general evolutionary trends. One of the products of this research direction is the database of Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins (COGs). ii) Exploitation of genome comparisons, particularly those between relatively close genomes, for addressing fundamental issues of evolutionary biology such as the nature of adaptation and selection in different categories of genes. iii) Classification and evolutionary analysis of protein domains and domain architectures. An important dimension in this type of research is the discovery of "new" domains that are shared by many diverse proteins but have not been defined previously. iv) Construction of a general physical theory of evolution. Dr. Koonin is the author of Sequence - Evolution - Function Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics, 2003, (with Michael Galperin) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=sef.TOC&depth=1) and the founder and Editor-in-Chief (with Laura Landweber and David Lipman) of Biology Direct, an Open Access journal that also employs open peer-review.

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Michael Lynch, Indiana University

Bio: Dr. Lynch is distinguished professor in the department of biology, Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in 1977 from University of Minnesota. His research is focused on mechanisms of evolution at the gene, genomic, cellular, and phenotypic levels, with special attention being given to the roles of mutation, random genetic drift, and recombination. He published influential books “Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits” (co-authored with Walsh in 1998) and “The Origins of Genome Architecture” (2007). In 2009 he was elected to National Academy of Sciences.

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Lior Pachter, UC Berkeley

Bio: Dr. Pachter is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Mathematics, and Computer Science, and is the director of the Laboratory for Mathematical and Computational Biology in the Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley. Pachter received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. He then moved to the mathematics department at UC Berkeley where he was a postdoctoral researcher for two years, before being hired as an assistant professor. He has been awarded an NSF Career award, and has received the Sloan Fellowship for his work on molecular biology and evolution. Pachter is the co-editor of "Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology" (with B. Sturfels), and is working on the fundamental problem of comparative genomics: the determination of the origins and evolutionary history of the nucleotides in all extant genomes. His work incorporates various aspects of genomics, including the reconstruction of ancestral genomes (paleogenomics), the modeling of genome dynamics (phylogenomics and systems biology) and the assignment of function to genome elements (functional genomics). He is currently working on revamping the required first-year math course for all biology majors at UC Berkeley.

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Pavel Pevzner, CASB and UC San Diego

Dr. Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Chair Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at University of California, San Diego. He holds a Ph.D. (1988) from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. Dr. Pevzner is author of the graduate textbook "Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach" in 2000 and the undergraduate textbook "Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms" in 2004 (jointly with Neal Jones). He was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2006. Dr. Pevzner is the director of the Interdisciplinary Bioinformatics Program at UCSD.

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Yitzhak (Tzachi) Pilpel, Weizmann Institute of Science

Dr. Pilpel is a professor in the department of molecular genetics at Weizmann Institute of Science. He received his B.Sc degree in Biology at Tel-Aviv University. He was mainly interested in genetics and worked in Daniel Segal's lab on embryonic development in flies. He moved to to the Weizmann Institute of Science for his graduate studies where he joined the group of Ephraim Katzir and helped develop computational methods to study protein-protein interactions. He later joined also Doron Lancet and worked with him on a theoretical model for pre-biotic self replication, the olfactory receptors and on modeling the structure of membrane proteins. He then did his postdoc at Harvard with George Church and turned to study transcription control. He devoted most of his efforts to the development of computational means to identify combinatorial factors that collectively and synergistically regulate transcription. In 2003, he opened a lab at the department of Molecular Genetics back at the Weizmann Institute. The lab is interested in the means by which micro-organisms cope with genetic challenges through redundancy and in understanding stress response. They study gene expression at the level of transcription, translation, mRNA decay and at the level of non-coding RNAs. The lab is supported by grants from the EU, EMBO and the Israel Science Foundation.

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Aviv Regev, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Bio: Computational biologist Aviv Regev joined the Broad Institute as a core faculty member in 2006. Her research centers on understanding how complex molecular networks function and evolve in the face of genetic and environmental changes. She studied for a direct M.Sc. at the Interdisciplinary Program for the Fostering of Excellence at Tel Aviv University, where she focused mostly on biology, computer science and mathematics, and did research in theoretical biology (on the evolution of development) and experimental biology (on genomic instability). In her Ph.D. research (with Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University and Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute) she developed a novel representation language for biomolecular processes based on a computer process algebra — a framework originally developed for studying concurrent computation systems.

In parallel, Aviv worked for several years in the biotech industry in Israel, where she established and directed a bioinformatics R&D team at QBI, a functional genomics company. In the past several years she has been a fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard University, where she worked on the reconstruction of regulatory networks and modules from genomics data.

In addition to her position at the Broad Institute, Aviv is an assistant professor in the department of biology at MIT and an Early Career Scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2008, she received the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. She is a past recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award.

Russell Schwartz, Carnegie Mellon University

Bio: Dr. Schwartz is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in June 2000 and subsequently did post-doctoral work in MIT Biology Department before moving to Celera Genomics to work on projects related to the sequencing of the human genome. He joined the Biological Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon in 2002, where he works on various problems in modeling, simulation, and algorithms for biological analysis. His research currently predominantly focuses on on stochastic models and associated algorithms for simulating large self-assembly systems and on algorithms for phylogenetics and genetic variation analysis. For his research accomplishments, he received a 2004 NSF CAREER Award and 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He is currently an Associate Director and co-chair of curriculum for the Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Joint Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, as well as one the directors of Carnegie Mellon's B.S. and M.S. programs in Computational Biology. Schwartz wrote the textbook "Biological Modeling and Simulation" based on a class he developed at Carnegie Mellon.

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Glenn Tesler, UC San Diego

Bio: Dr. Tesler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, a core faculty member in the interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate programs in bioinformatics, and an Affiliate Faculty member of Computer Science and Engineering.  He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995, in the area of Algebraic Combinatorics.  He studies computational and algorithmic aspects of comparative genomics, genome rearrangements, sequence assembly, and genome-wide association studies.

Dr. Tesler received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Molecular Biology in 2005.  He was the conference chair and program chair of theRECOMB Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics 2007.

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