Advisory Board and Editors Bioinformatics
Tak-Wah Lam
Tak-Wah Lam received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. His current research is in the areas of algorithms and bioinformatics. Apart from theoretical work, he is active in working together with the genomics industry to advance the software for NGS data analysis. The most recent software, called MEGAHIT, is targeted to assemble large volume of metagenomics data in a memory-and-time efficient manner.
Matteo Lambrughi
I'm currently a PostDoctoral researcher at the Computational Biology Laboratory at the Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenaghen, Denmark.
Sapna Langyan
Sapna Langyan is a scientist at ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi, India. She holds an experience of more than 11 years in agricultural research. She aims to contribute towards food and nutritional security of the world and alleviating malnutrition through research support. She has more than 30 research papers, book chapters, conference proceedings and many others in reputed national and international journals and also holds editorship of many reputed journals including Frontiers. She has also edited one book on ‘Maize: Nutrition dynamics and novel uses’, published by Springer https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9788132216223. She has been awarded many prestigious awards, fellowship and grants throughout her research career by premier science academies and by the Govt. of India.
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.
Denis Larkin
Reader in Comparative Genomics at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. Interests include the evolutionary and applied genomics, chromosome research and computer sciences. Associate Editor of Animal Biotechnology.
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.
Elliot J Lefkowitz
Professor of Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB); Director of Informatics for the UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science; Data Secretary of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and Editor-In-Chief of the ICTV Online (10th) Report on Virus Taxonomy. My research focuses on contributing to the understanding of microbial (especially viral) genomics and evolution by developing and utilizing computational tools and bioinformatics techniques to mine sequence and other data for significant patterns characteristic of function and/or evolution.
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.
Jingyi Jessica Li
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Department of Human Genetics at University of California, Los Angeles. I am also a faculty member in the Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program in Bioinformatics and a member in the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) Gene Regulation Research Program Area. Prior to joining UCLA, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the Interdepartmental Group in Biostatistics at University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Profs Peter J. Bickel and Haiyan Huang. I received my B.S. (summa cum laude) from Department of Biological Sciences and Technology at Tsinghua University, China in 2007.
Ning Li
Prof. Li received his Medical Doctorate in 2005 as an outstanding graduate of the Chinese Union Medical University (CUMU). In the same year, he worked in the Department of Thoracic Surgery at the Cancer Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, where he served as an attending physician, deputy chief physician, and was appointed Chief Physician in 2019. He has a solid theoretical foundation and excellent research ability, and has accumulated rich clinical experience during my work. In 2017, he took over as the Director of the Office of Drug Clinical Trial Research Center, and his outstanding achievements in the management of clinical trial institutions and clinical and translational research, and is currently served as the chief expert of China GCP platform and Leading PI of international multicenter clinical trials of anti-cancer drug discovery. He is committed to new anti-tumor drug research, real-world research, full chain translation research of clinical trials, precision treatment of rare tumors and tumor big data research. His H-Index is 44 based on Web of Science. As a sub-project leader of the National 973 Major Project, the National Key R&D Program for Precision Medicine, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the GCP platform leader, and the leader of the 13th and 14th Five-Year Innovation Project, he has undertaken many research projects.