Mark Gerstein | |
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Born | Mark Bender Gerstein February 23 |
Citizenship | US |
Alma mater |
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Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioinformatics [3] |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Protein recognition: surfaces and conformational change (1993) |
Doctoral advisor | |
Other academic advisors | Michael Levitt (postdoc) |
Doctoral students | Werner Krebs [6] [7] |
Website |
Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and Data Science. As of 2009 [update] , he is co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program.
Mark Gerstein is Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Professor of Statistics & Data Science, and Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. [8] In 2018, Gerstein was named co-director of the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science. [9]
After graduating from Harvard College summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989, Gerstein did a PhD co-supervised by Ruth Lynden-Bell [5] at the University of Cambridge and Cyrus Chothia at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology on conformational change in proteins, graduating in 1993. [10] He then went on to postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at Stanford University from 1993 to 1996 supervised by Nobel-laureate Michael Levitt.
Gerstein does research in the field of bioinformatics. [3] [11] [12] This involves applying a range of computational approaches to problems in molecular biology, including data mining and machine learning, molecular simulation, and database design. His research group has a number of foci including annotating the human genome, [13] personal genomics, cancer genomics, building tools in support of genome technologies (such as next-generation sequencing), analyzing molecular networks, and simulating macromolecular motions. Notable databases and tools that the group has developed include the Database of Macromolecular Motions, [6] [7] which categorizes macromolecular conformational change; tYNA, [14] which helps analyze molecular networks; PubNet, [15] which analyzes publication networks; PeakSeq, [16] which identifies regions in the genome bound by particular transcription factors; and CNVnator, [17] which categorizes block variants in the genome. Gerstein has also written extensively on how general issues in data science impact on genomics—in particular, in relation to privacy [18] and to structuring scientific communication. [19]
Gerstein's work has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals [20] [21] [22] and non-scientific publications in more popular forums. [23] His work has been highly cited, with an H greater than 100. [3] He serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including those of PLoS Computational Biology , Genome Research , Genome Biology , and Molecular Systems Biology . He has been quoted in the New York Times, [24] [25] [26] including on the front page, [13] and in other major newspapers. [27]
In addition to a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars award, [28] Gerstein has received awards from the US Navy, IBM, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Donaghue Foundation. [29] He is a Fellow of the AAAS. [1] Other awards include a Herchel-Smith Scholarship supporting his doctoral work at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is a contributor to a number of scientific consortia including ENCODE, [30] modENCODE, [31] [32] [33] 1000 Genomes Project, Brainspan, [34] and DOE Kbase.[ citation needed ] He was made a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2015. [2]
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.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.
The Database of Macromolecular Motions is a bioinformatics database and software-as-a-service tool that attempts to categorize macromolecular motions, sometimes also known as conformational change. It was originally developed by Mark B. Gerstein, Werner Krebs, and Nat Echols in the Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry Department at Yale University.
RNA-Seq is a technique that uses next-generation sequencing to reveal the presence and quantity of RNA molecules in a biological sample, providing a snapshot of gene expression in the sample, also known as transcriptome.
Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.
Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. As of 2016 projects include the use of Hidden Markov models in HMMER, Infernal Pfam and Rfam.
Lincoln David Stein is a scientist and Professor in bioinformatics and computational biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.
DNase-seq is a method in molecular biology used to identify the location of regulatory regions, based on the genome-wide sequencing of regions sensitive to cleavage by DNase I. FAIRE-Seq is a successor of DNase-seq for the genome-wide identification of accessible DNA regions in the genome. Both the protocols for identifying open chromatin regions have biases depending on underlying nucleosome structure. For example, FAIRE-seq provides higher tag counts at non-promoter regions. On the other hand, DNase-seq signal is higher at promoter regions, and DNase-seq has been shown to have better sensitivity than FAIRE-seq even at non-promoter regions.
Cyrus Homi Chothia was an English biochemist who was an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Burkhard Rost is a scientist leading the Department for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Rost chairs the Study Section Bioinformatics Munich involving the TUM and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in Munich. From 2007-2014 Rost was President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Cancer systems biology encompasses the application of systems biology approaches to cancer research, in order to study the disease as a complex adaptive system with emerging properties at multiple biological scales. Cancer systems biology represents the application of systems biology approaches to the analysis of how the intracellular networks of normal cells are perturbed during carcinogenesis to develop effective predictive models that can assist scientists and clinicians in the validations of new therapies and drugs. Tumours are characterized by genomic and epigenetic instability that alters the functions of many different molecules and networks in a single cell as well as altering the interactions with the local environment. Cancer systems biology approaches, therefore, are based on the use of computational and mathematical methods to decipher the complexity in tumorigenesis as well as cancer heterogeneity.
Chimeric RNA, sometimes referred to as a fusion transcript, is composed of exons from two or more different genes that have the potential to encode novel proteins. These mRNAs are different from those produced by conventional splicing as they are produced by two or more gene loci.
Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, ICREA Professor, current director of the Life Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. and of Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII). From 2015-2018, he was President of the International Society for Computational Biology. His research is focused on the study of biomedical systems with computational biology and bioinformatics approaches.
Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics at King's College London, Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. From 1 March 2024, Hubbard became the director of Europe's Life Science Data Infrastructure ELIXIR.
Alicia Yinema Kate Nungarai Oshlack is an Australian bioinformatician and is Co-Head of Computational Biology at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is best known for her work developing methods for the analysis of transcriptome data as a measure of gene expression. She has characterized the role of gene expression in human evolution by comparisons of humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and rhesus macaques, and works collaboratively in data analysis to improve the use of clinical sequencing of RNA samples by RNAseq for human disease diagnosis.
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist who is head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge and a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
ATAC-seq is a technique used in molecular biology to assess genome-wide chromatin accessibility. In 2013, the technique was first described as an alternative advanced method for MNase-seq, FAIRE-Seq and DNase-Seq. ATAC-seq is a faster analysis of the epigenome than DNase-seq or MNase-seq.
Michael P. Snyder is an American genomicist and the Stanford B. Ascherman Professor, and since 2009, chair of genetics and director of genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University. He is the former director of the Yale Center for Genomics and Proteomics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. During his tenure as chair of the department at Stanford, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Stanford University first or tied for first in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics.
Transcriptomics technologies are the techniques used to study an organism's transcriptome, the sum of all of its RNA transcripts. The information content of an organism is recorded in the DNA of its genome and expressed through transcription. Here, mRNA serves as a transient intermediary molecule in the information network, whilst non-coding RNAs perform additional diverse functions. A transcriptome captures a snapshot in time of the total transcripts present in a cell. Transcriptomics technologies provide a broad account of which cellular processes are active and which are dormant. A major challenge in molecular biology is to understand how a single genome gives rise to a variety of cells. Another is how gene expression is regulated.