Laurie J. Heyer is an American mathematician specializing in genomics and bioinformatics. She is Kimbrough Professor of Mathematics at Davidson College, [1] director of Davidson's Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, [2] and former chair of Davidson's Mathematics and Computer Science Department. [3]
Heyer is a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington. [1] She completed her Ph.D. in 1998 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation, The Probabilistic Behavior of Sequence Analysis Scores with Application to Structural Alignment of RNA, was jointly supervised by John A. Williamson and Gary Stormo. [4]
With Malcolm Campbell, Heyer is the author of the textbook Discovering Genomics, Proteomics, & Bioinformatics (Benjamin Cummings and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003; 2nd ed., Pearson, 2007). [5] Campbell, Heyer, and Christopher Paradise also wrote the electronic text Integrating Concepts in Biology. [6]
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.
Systems biology is the computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems, using a holistic approach to biological research.
Michael Spencer Waterman is a Professor of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where he holds an Endowed Associates Chair in Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science. He previously held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University.
Physiomics is a systematic study of physiome in biology. Physiomics employs bioinformatics to construct networks of physiological features that are associated with genes, proteins and their networks. A few of the methods for determining individual relationships between the DNA sequence and physiological function include metabolic pathway engineering and RNAi analysis. The relationships derived from methods such as these are organized and processed computationally to form distinct networks. Computer models use these experimentally determined networks to develop further predictions of gene function.
Galaxy is a scientific workflow, data integration, and data and analysis persistence and publishing platform that aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming or systems administration experience. Although it was initially developed for genomics research, it is largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system.
Igor I. Goryanin is a systems biologist, who holds a Henrik Kacser Chair in Computational Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He also heads the Biological Systems Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
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.
Olga G. Troyanskaya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology in NYC. She studies protein function and interactions in biological pathways by analyzing genomic data using computational tools.
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words, "[ Michael Waterman ] and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
Ming Li is a Canadian computer scientist, known for his fundamental contributions to Kolmogorov complexity, bioinformatics, machine learning theory, and analysis of algorithms. Li is currently a University Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics. In addition to academic achievements, his research has led to the founding of two independent companies.
Claudia Maria Neuhauser is a mathematician whose research focuses on mathematical biology and spatial ecology. She also investigates computational biology and bioinformatics. Neuhauser is currently Interim Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Research at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since 2018.
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Cathy H. Wu is the Edward G. Jefferson Chair and professor and director of the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (CBCB) at the University of Delaware. She is also the director of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the North east Bioinformatics Collaborative Steering Committee, and the adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the first woman to do so in the history of the society.
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
Stefano Lonardi is an Italian computer scientist and bioinformatician, currently Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, Riverside. He is also a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics, the Center for Plant Cell Biology, the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, and the Graduate Program in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology.
Rafael Irizarry is a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of biostatistics and computational biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. Irizarry is known as one of the founders of the Bioconductor project.
Mona Singh is a Professor of Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.
Vineet Bafna is an Indian bioinformatician and professor of computer science and director of bioinformatics program at University of California, San Diego. He was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. He has also been a member of the Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) conference steering committee.
Keith A. Crandall is an American computational biologist, bioinformaticist, and population geneticist at George Washington University, where he is the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute, and professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.