Advisory Board and Editors Computational Biology
Kjiersten Fagnan
Kjiersten Fagnan joined the JGI in 2012 after completing a petascale postdoctoral fellowship at NERSC and CRD. In 2014 Fagnan became the JGI-NERSC Engagement Lead with a focus on adapting JGI workloads to run on supercomputing hardware. She is also working to understand the data-intensive nature of JGI workloads. Fagnan earned her PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in 2010 and her BA from UC Berkeley in 2002.
Brant C Faircloth
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University and Research Associate as the LSU Museum of Natural Sciences. Research interests include population and evolutionary genomics of non-model organisms; community genomics; genotype-phenotype interactions; (immuno-)genetic basis of mate choice; mating behavior; social behavior; and natural history.
Joseph Felsenstein
Joe Felsenstein is Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and in the Department of Biology, and adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. Past President of the Society for the Study of Evolution. Recipient of the Weldon Memorial Prize, the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society of London, the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science from the National Academy of Sciences and of the 2013 International Prize for Biology of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. On the Editorial Board of five journals.
He describes himself as "world-renowned for my outstanding modesty".
Carlos Fernandez-Lozano
Dr. Carlos Fernandez-Lozano is an Associate Professor at the University of A Coruña (UDC). He is a biomedical data scientist with a deep interest in discovering the complex relationships between different biological levels. His research track is multidisciplinary as he is trained in computer science, machine learning, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. His research line is focused on how biological interactions are manifested at the disease level through the use, development, and application of kernel-based computational approaches that integrate different levels of biological data on the microorganism, gene, protein, and medical imaging axis.
Pedro G Ferreira
Pedro G. Ferreira graduated in Systems and Informatics Engineering from the University of Minho in 2002 and obtained his Ph. D. in Artificial Intelligence from the same University in 2007. From 2008 to 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bioinformatics and Genomics Laboratory, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow the Functional Population Genomics and Genetics of Complex Traits group, School of Medicine, University of Geneva. He has been involved in several large international consortia including: ICGC-CLL, ENCODE, GEUVADIS, SYSCOL and GTEx. He published several papers in high impact journals, including the multidisciplinary journals: Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, PNAS and eLife. Other papers have been published in high impact specialized journals including Genome Biology, Genome Research, American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, RNA or Leukemia. He is the author of 3 book chapters and 2 books. He has an h-index of 31, with a total > 32 000 citations. In 2015, he was awarded an FCT Investigator Starting grant and he joined Ipatimup/i3s. He was awrded the Research Award 2015 and 2019 from Portuguese Society of Human Genetics - SPGH and the Microsoft Azure Research Award for Data Science 2017. He is a partner in a bioinformatics data analysis company with national and international clients, including hospitals, diagnostic clinics and research centres. From 2015 to 2018, he was an invited assistant professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Minho, where he taught bioinformatics and data analysis at master's level. He has been involved in the final supervision of 1 postdoctoral fellow, 2 PhD students, 22 Masters students and 3 research assistants, and in the ongoing (main and co-) supervision of 5 PhD students and 5 Masters students. He was the director of the Masters and Specialisation in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2020-2023). He has experience in the genomics start-up environment, where he developed information systems for personal genomics data interpretation. He is currently an Assistant Professor (since 02/2019) with Habilitation (since 10/2022) at Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto and a Senior Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Group at INESCTEC. He is currently the Director of the Bachelor in Bioinformatics and Adjunct Director of the Bachelor in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. His main research focus is on developing methods for a variety of problems in genomic data science. In particular, he is interested in unravelling the role of genomics in human health and disease. To achieve this goal, he applies and develops data analysis models using machine learning and probabilistic methods to analyse and interpret diverse, complex and large-scale genomic datasets.
Daniel Fischer
I studied Statistics and Computer Sciences at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. During that time, my interest was particularly in mathematical statistics with a focus on high-dimensional extensions of the univariate median. After graduating, I moved to Tampere, Finland and completed my PhD in at the University of Tampere in Biostatistics with minor Bioinformatics.
While still being enrolled as PhD student at the University I started to work as a researcher in Bioinformatics at the MTT, Jokioinen, Finland. Since 2015 I am working at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) where I finalized my PhD.
My published articles in peer-reviewed journals cover a wide range of applications as well as statistical theory. My areas of expertise are target gene detection, biomarker identification and novel gene detection with a special focus on long non-coding RNAs. Further, I have experiences in the development of statistical methods for DE testing as well as deriving novel non-parametrical tests for (e)QTL analyses. I published and maintain currently six R-packages, i.e. for (e)QTL testing, cross-species ortholog detection and dimension reduction methods.
Lasse Folkersen
PhD in genetics from Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Research according to an overarching theme of my research is the use of high-throughput omics to bridge the gap between research and medicine. My initial interest was in expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL), and their possibilities for translating genetics to medical use. This followed a further step into actual industrial drug and pharmacogenetics development from the technique, performed at Novo Nordisk, Denmark. Current interests focus on further translation of main genetics results into actual use both in the clinical context of response stratification and in the industrial context of drug development.
Simon DW Frost
Reader in Pathogen Dynamics at the University of Cambridge; formerly Adjunct Associate Professor in the Dept. of Pathology, University of California San Diego (UCSD). Graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences (1st class), Trinity College, Cambridge (1992), DPhil in Mathematical Biology, Merton College, Oxford (1996). Postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, Oxford University, University of Edinburgh and UCSD. Awards include: NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship (1996), MRC Nonclinical Training Fellowship (1997-2000), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2008-2013), and Thomson-Reuters Highly Cited Researcher awards in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Atsushi Fukushima
I am a professor at Kyoto Prefectural University. My current research interests focus on characterization of metabolic regulatory networks and integrated analysis of multi-omics data in plants. I am a member of the editorial board for BMC Genomics, Plant Methods, Frontiers in Plant Science, Plants, BioTech, and PeerJ.
Zhiwei Gao
Dr. Gao joined Northumbria University in 2011. His research interests include machine learning, data-driven approaches, intelligent optimisation and their applications in complex systems, wind energy systems and healthcare systems.
Lalit Garg
Prof. Lalit Garg is an Associate Professor in Computer Information Systems at the University of Malta, Malta, and an honorary lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has been a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Ulster University, UK. Prof Garg has supervised 200+ Masters' dissertations, 2 DBA and 5 PhD theses and published 150+ high-impact publications in refereed journals/conferences/books, 17 edited books and 22 patents. He has delivered numerous keynote speeches, organised/chaired international conferences, and consulted countless public and private organisations for information systems implementation and management. His research interests are business intelligence, machine learning, data science, deep learning, cloud computing, mobile computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), information systems, management science and their applications, mainly in healthcare and medical domains. He participates in many EU and locally funded projects, including a one million euro Erasmus+ Capacity-Building project in Higher Education (CBHE), titled Training for Medical Education via Innovative eTechnology (MediTec) and Malta Council of Science and Technology's Space Research Funds. The University of Malta has awarded him the 2021-22 Research Excellence Award for exploring Novel Intelligent Computing Methods for healthcare requirements forecasting, allocation and management (NICE-Healthcare).
Mikhail S Gelfand
Vice-Director for Science at the Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems. Professor of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and Higher School of Economics. Member of Academia Europaea. Recipient of the 2007 Baev Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Member of Editorial Boards of PeerJ and Biology Direct.