The theme of our panel discussion this year will be Bioinformatics in the era of personal genomics. We are inviting panelists from academia, industry and other sectors to talk about their experiences and discuss questions from the audience. Panelists at previous symposiums include Philip E. Bourne, Richard Wintle, Alfonso Valencia and Jong Bhak.
Panelists
Michael Brudno is the Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Banting & Best Department at the University of Toronto. After a BA in Computer Science and History from UC Berkeley, he got his PhD from the Computer Science Department of Stanford University developing several approaches for comparison of genomic sequences, including the LAGAN Alignment Toolkit, "glocal" alignment algorithms for sequences with rearrangements, and whole genome alignments. His postdoc work at the Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley primarily addressed the problem of whole genome assembly from shotgun read data. After his postdoc he was a Visiting Scientist at CSAIL (MIT) before starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in January 2006. Most recently he has worked on analysis and interpretation of short read data generated by Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, including methods for read mapping, genome assembly, and discovery of structural and copy-number variation from NGS data.
Subhajyoti De is currently a Research Fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge, UK. He has done his PhD in Computational Genomics at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Besides research he is also interested in science writing for a broad audience. He is a science and technology ambassador for the educational outreach programme of the university.
Dirk Evers is the Director, Computational Biology at Illumina’s Cambridge, UK site. His group is responsible for the development of the analysis software (GA Pipeline and CASAVA) supporting the Genome Analyzer sequencing systems. After graduating in Computer Science specializing in Biology at Bielefeld University, Germany he received his doctorate in Bioinformatics on RNA secondary structure prediction algorithms (with Prof. Giegerich). He moved to Tübingen to join Artemis Pharmaceuticals (an Exelixis company) working on Zebrafish genetic screens for drug target identification and validation. In 2004 he joined Bielefeld University’s Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) as Executive Director of the International Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research which he ran successfully for almost 4 years graduating 30+ PhDs in the departments of Biology, Technology, Mathematics, and Chemistry before moving to Illumina in 2007. His current interests are broadly centered around advancing next generation sequencing technologies and more specifically in de novo assembly and Cancer re-sequencing analysis approaches.
