Speakers

	Ruben Abagyan Professor of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute Title: Computational structural proteomics for drug discovery Bio: Dr. Ruben Abagyan is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology of The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, since 1999. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1980 and received his Ph.D. in molecular modeling and biophysics from the Moscow State University in 1984. In 1990 he moved to Heidelberg Germany and became a staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where he laid the foundation for a new internal coordinate approach to molecular structure prediction and molecular docking (ICM). In 1994 he moved to New York University where he became the director of computational biology and IT at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. At NYU he received tenure as Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Mathematics at the NYU Medical School and the Courant Institute of Mathematics, respectively. During the same year he co-founded the Molsoft Company to continue the development of the ICM program. From 1999 to 2001 he served as the Director of Computational Biology, Chemistry and IT at the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics. Dr. Abagyan has co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. He has developed an international reputation in the field of proteomics and structure-based drug discovery and received grants from NIH, DOE, DOD and private organizations. He has served on the Board of Directors of Syrrx and Plexus Vaccines, and on organizing committees for conferences on drug discovery. In 2000 and 2002 he accepted CapCure Award for excellence in prostate cancer research, and in 2003 he received the Princess Diana medal in Sydney, Australia. In 2007 Dr. Abagyan was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego and received an Excellence Award from the UCSD School of Pharmacy.
	Howard Asher President and CEO, Global Life Sciences, Inc. Title: The Role of Information Technology in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Bio: Howard began his career in life sciences in 1969 with Pfizer. He continued his marketing, sales and product development work with Baxter and Bayer until 1979. Late in 1979 he founded Advanced Bioresearch Associates (ABA) which grew to be the premier Life Sciences—FDA Regulatory Affairs consulting firm for Life Science company clients, worldwide. Howard served as President, CEO and Chairman of ABA for 20 years, securing regulatory approval for hundreds of medical products, including drugs, biotherapeutics, medical devices and in-vitro diagnostics. In 1999, Howard founded BioQ Inc. to address the time and cost of managing information associated with medical products within life science industry. Howard served as President, CEO of BioQ where he was dedicated to creating a significantly innovative, smart automated system to expedite the medical product information process. Howard in 2001 joined Sun Microsystems, Inc, as its Group Director of Global Life and Health Sciences. At Sun, Howard led the worldwide sales and marketing teams active within 140 nations. While at Sun, Howard founded the LSIT Global Institute to develop an independent source of trusted IT guidance referred to as Good Informatics Practices (GIP) guidelines for the global life and health sciences community. Howard has utilized his 27 years as successful CEO by participating on many Boards over the years, including; BIOCOM, Quorex Pharmaceuticals, Stryker Corp. (Howmedica, Osteonics), the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, PharmaPrint, Biomatters, Inc. and many others. Howard also teaches at the UCSD School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Rady School of Management at U.C. San Diego.
	Philip E. Bourne Professor of Pharmacology, UCSD Panel moderator Bio: Philip E. Bourne is a Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Co-Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB), Senior Advisor to the Life Sciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute and the Keck Graduate Institute. Philip E. Bourne received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Flinders University of South Australia in 1980 where he studied the structural and electrophilic effects of substitution on fully saturated caged hydrocarbon molecules. While a post-doctoral fellow at Sheffield University UK he contributed to the understanding of the structural role of the protein ferritin in iron storage. Later as a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University in New York he proposed mechanisms for the role of caracurines and snake toxins that operate postsynaptically. During the 80's as first the Director of the Cancer Center Computer Facility and later Director of the Medical School Computer Facility at Columbia University he helped establish a tumor registry and various applications and databases in support of patient care. In the early 90's as a Senior Associate of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute he worked on developing high performance hardware and software for computational structural biology. He moved to UCSD in 1995 to work on structural bioinformatics. His current research interests are in structural genomics, the structural basis of evolution and immunology, apoptosis, cell signaling, data and knowledge modeling and scientific visualization. Philip E. Bourne is an elected Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association and past President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He is the author of over 200 scientific papers and 4 books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies. He has received two UCSD Connect Awards for new inventions in the areas of comparative protein structure analysis and shared visualization. Most recently he was the recipient of the 2002 Sun Microsystems Convergence Award and the 2004 Convocation Medal for career achievement from his graduate university. He has co-founded four companies.
	Steven Burley, CSO, SGX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Title: Discovery and development of selective, orally bioavailable tyrosine kinase inhibitors for targeted treatment of human cancer. Bio: Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil., is Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President, Research at SGX Pharmaceuticals. Stephen has been an Adjunct Professor at The Rockefeller University since February 2002, where he was also the Richard M. and Isabel P. Furlaud Professor from June 1997 to January 2002. He was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from September 1994 to January 2002. He was previously the Principal Investigator of the New York Structural Genomics Research Consortium. Stephen is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the New York Academy of Sciences. His research focused on the macromolecular machines responsible for mRNA transcription, splicing and translation in eukaryotes and on the problem of antibiotic resistance. Stephen received an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School and, as a Rhodes Scholar, he received a D.Phil. in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford University. His clinical training combined a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital with postdoctoral work in protein crystallography under the direction of William N. Lipscomb at Harvard University. He received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Western Ontario. In 1999, Stephen co-founded Prospect Genomics, Inc., a San Francisco-based drug discovery company that SGX acquired in May 2001.
	Gary Fogel Vice President, Natural Selection, Inc. Title: Computational Intelligence Methods in Bioinformatics Bio: Dr. Fogel joined Natural Selection, Inc. in 1998 after completing the Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Los Angeles with a focus on the evolution and variability of histone proteins. While at UCLA, Dr. Fogel was a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life and earned several teaching and research awards. Dr. Fogel's current research interests focus on the application of computational intelligence methods to problems in the biomedical sciences. He is currently investigating the use of these approaches for gene expression analysis, gene recognition, drug activity/toxicity prediction, structure analysis and similarity, sequence alignment, and biomedical pattern recognition. Dr. Fogel leads Natural Selection, Inc.'s efforts in chem- and bioinformatics. Dr. Fogel is a senior member of the IEEE, member of Sigma Xi and the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Dr. Fogel currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, and BioSystems, and is an editorial advisory board member of Ecological Informatics. Dr. Fogel served as technical co-chair for the 2001 and 2006 Congresses on Evolutionary Computation, program chair for the 2004 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, and as general chair for the 2004 and 2005 IEEE Symposia on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2007 IEEE CIBCB). He currently serves as finance chair for the 2008 IEEE CIBCB meeting to be held in Sun Valley, Idaho (www.cibcb.org). Dr. Fogel has recently been re-elected to serve a second term on the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Administrative Committee (AdCom) for the period 2007-2009.
	Steven Hofstadler Vice President of Research, Ibis Bioscience, Inc. Title: Using Information Derived from High Throughput Mass Spectrometry in the Biotechnology Arena: from Drug Discovery to Pathogen Detection and Strain Typing Bio: Steven A. Hofstadler received a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from The University of Texas at Austin. Upon completing his graduate studies, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where he developed high performance instrumentation and methodologies based on Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR) mass spectrometry. Upon completion of his post-doctoral studies he remained at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a Senior Research Scientist for nearly 5 years during which time he continued to develop FTICR instrumentation in combination with numerous microcolumn separations. In 1997 Dr. Hofstadler relocated to Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. where his work was centered on the mass spectrometric characterization of noncovalent complexes between RNA and small drug-like molecules. Presently he is the Vice President of Research in the Ibis Biosciences Subsidiary. His most current research interests include applications of high performance mass spectrometry for the analysis of nucleic acids as a means to characterize microorganisms and to forensically differentiate humans. He is the author/co-author over 100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, holds > 15 patents, and has given numerous invited talks at national and international scientific meetings. Dr. Hofstadler has coordinated mass spectrometry effort for several DARPA programs: Drugs for Engineered Biological Warfare Bacteria (1997-1999), Universal Pathogen Protection (1999-2001), and TIGER (2000-2006) and related programs sponsored by CDC, DHS, FBI and other government agencies. Dr. Hofstadler received an R&D 100 Award in 2000 for the development of MASS "Multitarget Affinity/Specificity Screening" and another in 2005 for co-development of the Ibis pathogen detection platform; in 2004 he was the recipient of the Society for Biomolecular Screening's PerkinElmer Life Sciences Award for Innovations in High Throughput Screening. Recent affiliations have included: Scientific Advisory Board - Bruker Biosciences, Scientific Committee - Association for Laboratory Automation, Editorial Advisory Board for Analytical Chemistry, NIH Special Emphasis Review Panel, and member of the organizing committee for the ASMS Asilomar Conference on Mass Spectrometry.
	Trey Ideker Associate Professor of Bioengineering, UCSD Title: Gaining power in gene association studies with Cytoscape: Mapping gene regulatory pathways by assembly of physical and genetic interactions Bio: Dr. Ideker received bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he was elected to the HKN Engineering Honor Society and awarded the Northern Telecom/BNR prize for his work in digital circuit design. Encouraged by developments in the Human Genome Project, Dr. Ideker rapidly became interested in applying methods from computer science and engineering to the understanding of biological systems. Towards this goal, he obtained a Ph.D. in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington and at the Institute for Systems Biology under Dr. Leroy Hood. He then moved to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the David Baltimore Fellow and Pfizer Fellow of Computational Biology. Dr. Ideker is currently a member of the Dept. of Bioengineering at U. C. San Diego, where he is Associate Professor. He serves on the advisory board of Genstruct and the BioCyc Project, has been a Bioinformatics Lecturer for ISTR, Inc., and holds several patents in the fields of microarray analysis and systems biology.
	Tobias Mann Bioinformatics Scientist, Illumina, Inc. Title: Visualizing High Throughput Sequencing Experiments Bio: Tobias Mann is a bioinformtics scientist at Illumina, Inc. He received undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy from the University of Washington. After working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on image analysis and computational biology, he returned to the University of Washington and earned a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and then a Ph.D. in Genome Sciences. His dissertation research applied machine learning techniques and recent results in DNA thermodynamics to PCR primer design.
	Gerard Manning Director, Razavi-Newman Center for Bioinformatics, Salk Institute Title: Comparative Kinomics: How genome sequences and a billion years of evolution can help us understand protein kinase function, cell signaling and human disease Bio: Dr. Manning received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from Stanford University, where he established the Drosophila tracheal (respiratory) system as a model for organogenesis as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow. After a short-term postdoctoral research, he joined Molecular Applications Group as a group leader for a multi-disciplinary team to turn genome data into functional profiles of health and industrial importance. In 1999, he moved to SUGEN Inc and pioneered in kinome-scale analysis to select kinases for target validation, toxicology and biomarker discovery in oncology and other therapeutic areas. He patented over 300 novel human signaling genes using innovative gene prediction and sequence analysis methods, securing an unprecedented level of intellectual property for Sugen's core scientific and business expertise. Since 2004, Dr. Manning is the director of Razavi-Newman Center for Bioinformatic of Salk Institute. Besides leading research programs on genomics and evolution of protein kinase signaling, he has created new research programs in comparative genomics of non-coding DNA, systems biology of aging, and metagenomic sequence analysis. Dr. Manning also serves the scientific community as the associate editor of PLoS Computational Biology and specialist advisor of HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee and Gene Ontology Consortium.
	Bernhard Palsson Professor of Bioengineering, UCSD Title: (TBA) Bio: Bernhard Palsson is The Galetti Professor of Bioengineering and Adjunct Professor Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Palsson earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1984. He held a faculty position at the University of Michigan from 1984 to 1995. He co-authored the text TISSUE ENGINEERING, Prentice Hall in 2004, and SYSTEMS BIOLOGY, Cambridge University Press in 2006. He sits on the editorial boards of several bioengineering and biotechnology journals. Professor Palsson received an Institute of International Education Fellowship in 1977, Rotary Fellowship in 1979, a NATO fellowship in 1984, was named the G.G. Brown Associate Professor at Michigan in 1989, a Fulbright Fellow in 1995, an Ib Henriksen Fellow in 1996, the Olaf Hougen Professorship at the University of Wisconsin in 1999, the Lindbergh Tissue Engineering award in 2001, was named the Galetti Chair of Bioengineering in 2004, was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2006, received the UCSD Chancellor's Associates award in Science and Technology in 2006, and was selected as the developer of one of the most influential technologies on Biotech over the past 10 years by Nature Biotechnology (March 2006). Professor Palsson is an inventor with 28 U.S. patents, many of which are in the area of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, cell culture technology, bioreactor design, gene transfer, cell separations, high-throughput single cell manipulation, network reconstruction, in silico model building and metabolic engineering. He co-founded a biotechnology company, AASTROM BIOSCIENCES (NASDAQ: ASTM) in 1988, where he served as the Vice President of Developmental Research for two years. Dr. Palsson is the founder and co-founder of ONCOSIS, a company that was focused on the purging of occult tumor cells in autologous bone marrow transplants, renamed as CYNTELLECT (www.cyntellect.com), focusing on instrumentation for high-throughput screening and in situ cell sorting and processing, and GENOMATICA (www.genomatica.com), a company that is focused on in silico biology (a spin-off from UCSD).