Christophe Dessimoz | |
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![]() Christophe Dessimoz speaking at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) / European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Basel, 2019 | |
Born | Christophe Dessimoz 1980 (age 44–45) |
Alma mater | ETH Zurich (MSc, PhD) |
Known for | Orthologous MAtrix (OMA) [1] |
Awards | Overton Prize (2019) [2] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioinformatics Genomics Phylogenetics Evolution Computational Biology [3] |
Institutions | University of Lausanne European Bioinformatics Institute University College London Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics |
Thesis | Comparative Genomics Using Pairwise Evolutionary Distances (2009) |
Doctoral advisor | Gaston Gonnet [4] |
Website | lab |
Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. [5] [3] [6] [7] [8] He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. [2] Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Dessimoz obtained his Master of Science degree in 2003 [5] and PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from ETH Zurich in Switzerland [9] where his doctoral research was supervised by Gaston Gonnet [4] and examined by Amos Bairoch. [9]
After postdoctoral research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, [10] he joined University College London (UCL) as lecturer in 2013, and was promoted to Reader in 2015. [5] In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as professor, retaining an appointment at UCL. [11] Since 2016, Dessimoz has served as group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics [5] where his research interests are in bioinformatics, genomics, phylogenetics, evolution and computational biology. [3] [12] [13] [14] [15]
Dessimoz is known for his management of the Orthologous MAtrix (OMA) [1] which provides information on orthologous proteins. OMA has important applications in protein function prediction. [2] Dessimoz's approach to benchmarking had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference, sequence alignment, and the gene ontology (GO). [2] [16] [17]
Dessimoz was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to computational biology. [2]