Advisory Board and Editors Computational Biology
Clement Kent
Dr. Clement Kent is a an Adjunct Professor at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has prior background math and computing; but since 2005 his research interests have focused on behavioral genetics and genomics, for both fruit flies and social insects, primarily honeybees, as well as conservation of pollinators.
Hossein Khiabanian
Hossein is an Associate Professor of Pathology in the Division of Medical Informatics at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. His group develops novel analytical methods to understand the underlying genetics of human diseases and the molecular epidemiology of disease-causing organisms using high-throughput genomic data. The group is especially interested in studying tumor clonal evolution, and identifying prognostic markers in cancer, particularly in hematological malignancies. Hossein received his Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University, where he studied galaxy clusters and dark matter structures, using weak gravitational lensing. Prior to joining Rutgers, he was a member of the faculty in the Department Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University.
Elizabeth G King
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri. The goal of our research is to explain the diversity of life history strategies among organisms. We primarily, though not exclusively, use insect model systems for our research.
Rahul Kumar
Dr. Rahul Kumar is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. He is a computational biologist working in the field of computational cancer genomics.
Julia Kzhyshkowska
1997: PhD Cancer Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow.
1997-2001: Postdoc at the University of Regensburg
2001-2007: Junior group leader/PI and lecturer, University of Heidelberg.
2007- 2010:Senior group leader/PI and senior lecturer, University of Heidelberg
2010-2013: Professor, head of the Lab for Cellular and Molecular Biology of Innate Immunity;
2013-permanent: Professor, head of Department for Innate Immunity and Tolerance, University of Heidelberg.
Carmelo La Rosa
Carmelo La Rosa is a Professor of Physical-Chemistry at the University of Catania, Italy. He received a master’s degree in Chemistry and Ph.D. in Physical-Chemistry from the University of Catania (Italy), working on lyotropic liquid crystals. After completing postdoctoral training on thermodynamics and kinetics of protein folding-unfolding at the University of Catania and Leiden University (The Netherland), he joined the department of Chemical Sciences, University of Catania. His current research focuses on the biophysics of amyloidogenic proteins and their interaction with model membranes.
Hilmar Lapp
Aside from my role as Director of Informatics at Duke University's Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB), I am a PI for the NSF-funded project on creating a model and standard for phyloreferencing (http://phyloref.org), and I am a co-PI of the (also NSF-funded) Phenoscape project (http://phenoscape.org) on ontological annotation of evolutionary phenotype observations. I am a co-founder and current Board of Directors member of Data Carpentry (http://datacarpentry.org), and I was part of the founding team for Dryad (http://datadryad.org), a digital repository for data supporting scientific publications. I have also served in the leadership of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) since its inception in 2001.
Before joining Duke's GCB, I was at the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), where I initiated many of NESCent's cyberinfrastructure initiatives aimed at grass-roots building of community capacity, including the NESCent's hackathon program and Google Summer of Code™ (GSoC) participation.
Brittany N Lasseigne
Brittany N. Lasseigne, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. She trained in Biotechnology, Science, and Engineering at Mississippi State University (B.S.) and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (Ph.D.) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics and genomics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
Her lab develops and applies genomic- and data-driven strategies (including single-cell and long-read sequencing) to discover biological signatures that might be used to improve patient care and provide insight into the cellular and molecular processes contributing to disease, especially for diseases impacting the brain and/or kidney. Their recent work includes prioritizing drug repurposing candidates for cancers and polycystic kidney disease, evaluating preclinical models and cross-species transcriptomic signatures to improve disease modeling, and applying single-cell and long-read technologies to neurological disease tissues to understand the role that context plays in disease etiology, progression, and treatment.
The Lasseigne Lab is currently focused on integrating genomics data, functional annotations, and patient information with machine learning and regulatory network approaches across diseases that impact the brain or kidney to discover novel mechanisms in disease etiology and progression, identify genome-driven therapeutic targets and opportunities for drug repositioning and repurposing, determine clinically-relevant biomarkers, and understand how cellular context contributes to these diseases. Collectively, these distinct projects all apply genetics and genomics to human diseases and build tools to accelerate future research. Their lab also develops data science software and analytical pipelines that are open-source, well-documented, and hosted by third-party code distributors, critical for facilitating reproducibility and enabling the research community to use the methods they develop.
Timo Lassmann
Head of computational biology and the genetics and rare disease program at the Telethon Kids Institute. Interested in sequence analysis, large scale data integration and medical genomics. Past: RIKEN, Karolinska Institute, King's College London.
Gerard R. Lazo
Geneticist with the Crop Improvement and Genetics Research Unit, Agricultural Research Service, Western Regional Research Center, Albany, CA, USA.
Tim P Levine
Tim Levine trained first as a medic then moved into membrane cell biology, and then into intracellular lipid traffic. He showed that inter-organellar contacts are important sites for non-vesicular traffic inside cells. This was part of a revolution in our understanding of intracellular organelles. For over 40 years previously membrane contact sites had been largely ignored or dismissed as artefacts. Tim initially found a lipid transfer protein that localised to a contact site, and showed that it bound to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) protein VAP via a motif he named the FFAT motif. FFAT motifs are present in several other lipid transfer proteins leading Tim to propose that FFAT-motif proteins would act at contact sites by binding simultaneously to both the ER and another membrane. By improving the definition of FFAT-like motifs, Tim showed they are present in numerous other proteins, facilitating molecular research of many contact site components. Tim organised the first two conferences on contact sites in 2005 and 2011, linking advances in lipid traffic to those in calcium traffic to bring together these overlapping sub-disciplines.
Tim has also used remote homology tools to identify a new family of lipid transfer proteins anchored at contact sites, and highlighted the power of these tools through specific examples and a ‘How-To’ guide.
Suzanna E. Lewis
Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Joint winner, American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb Cleveland Prize for best paper of the year: "The genome sequence of D. melanogaster."