Human accelerated regions (HARs), first described in August 2006, are a set of 49 segments of the human genome that are conserved throughout vertebrate evolution but are strikingly different in humans. They are named according to their degree of difference between humans and chimpanzees. Found by scanning through genomic databases of multiple species, some of these highly mutated areas may contribute to human-specific traits. Others may represent loss of functional mutations, possibly due to the action of biased gene conversion rather than adaptive evolution.
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Søren Brunak is a Danish biological and physical scientist working in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical informatics. He is a professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen and professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. As Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, he leads a research effort where molecular-level systems biology data are combined with phenotypic data from the healthcare sector, such as electronic patient records, registry information, and biobank questionnaires. A major aim is to understand the network biology basis for time-ordered comorbidities and discriminate between treatment-related disease correlations and other comorbidities in disease trajectories. Søren Brunak also holds a position as a Medical Informatics Officer at Rigshospitalet, the Capital Region of Denmark.
The ISCB Overton Prize is a computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biology either through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.
Trey Ideker is a professor of medicine and bioengineering at UC San Diego. He is the Director of the National Resource for Network Biology, the San Diego Center for Systems Biology, and the Cancer Cell Map Initiative. He uses genome-scale measurements to construct network models of cellular processes and disease.
Richard M. Myers is an American geneticist and biochemist known for his work on the Human Genome Project (HGP). The National Human Genome Research Institute says the HGP “[gave] the world a resource of detailed information about the structure, organization and function of the complete set of human genes.” Myers' genome center, in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the project.
Adam C. Siepel is an American computational biologist known for his research in comparative genomics and population genetics, particularly the development of statistical methods and software tools for identifying evolutionarily conserved sequences. Siepel is currently Chair of the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology and Professor in the Watson School for Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Mathieu Daniel Blanchette is a computational biologist and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research focuses on developing new algorithms for the detection of functional regions in DNA sequences.
Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University.
Michael Andrew Fischbach is an American chemist, microbiologist, and geneticist. He is an associate professor of Bioengineering and ChEM-H Faculty Fellow at Stanford University and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present.
Alexander Marson is an American biologist and infectious disease doctor who specializes in genetics, human immunology, and genome engineering. He is the Director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, and a tenured Professor with a dual appointment in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
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. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Zhiping Weng is the Li Weibo Professor of biomedical research and chair of the program in integrative biology and bioinformatics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2020 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.
Donald "Don" Emil Ganem is an American physician, virologist, professor emeritus of microbiology and medicine, and former global head of infectious disease research at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR).
Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.
Janet Knutson Jansson is an American biological scientist who is the Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She investigates complex microbial communities, including those found in soil and the human gut. Jansson is part of the Phenotypic Response of the Soil Microbiome to Environmental Perturbations Science Focus Area, and is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.
