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.
Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM). The one-letter code used for amino acids was developed by her, reflecting an attempt to reduce the size of the data files used to describe amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
David J. States is an American biophysicist who is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan. His research group is using computational methods to understand the human genome and how it relates to the human proteome. He is the Director of the Michigan NIH Bioinformatics Training Progra] and a Senior Scientist in the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics.
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.
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.
Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava is an Indian bio-informatician and head of computational biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology.
Yves A. Lussier is a physician-scientist conducting research in Precision medicine, Translational bioinformatics and Personal Genomics. As a co-founder of Purkinje, he pioneered the commercial use of controlled medical vocabulary organized as directed semantic networks in electronic medical records, as well as Pen computing for clinicians.
Lawrence E. Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computational biology, which led to the genesis of the major professional organization in the field and two international conferences.
Kayvan Najarian is an Iranian-American scientist, who is a Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Department of Emergency Medicine, and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the director of Biomedical and Clinical Informatics (BCIL) University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Additionally, he is an Associate Director of Michigan Institute for Data Sciences (MIDAS). He is also serving as an Associate Director of the MCIRCC's. Kayvan Najarian has over 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, as well as several US and international patents. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is a reviewer, referee or member of dozens more committees, journals and councils. He received his B.SC. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, his M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of British Columbia.
Robert F. Murphy is Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology Emeritus and Director of the M.S. Program in Automated Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his retirement in May 2021, he was the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology as well as Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning. He was founding Director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon and founded the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He also founded the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University and served as its head from 2009 to 2020.
Jason H. Moore is a translational bioinformatics scientist, biomedical informatician, and human geneticist, the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics and Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Senior Associate Dean for Informatics and Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics.
Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is a field that emerged in the 2010s to study health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.
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.
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist.
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.
Xiaole Shirley Liu (刘小乐) is computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is now the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics.
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.
Jens Meiler is a German-American biologist and structural chemist. He currently serves as a Professor of Chemistry and Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on protein structures and computational biology, drawing on interdisciplinary techniques from other sciences.
Nikolay V. Dokholyan is an American biophysicist, academic and researcher. He is a G. Thomas Passananti Professor and Vice Chair for Research at Penn State College of Medicine.
Biomedical data science is a multidisciplinary field which leverages large volumes of data to promote biomedical innovation and discovery. Biomedical data science draws from various fields including Biostatistics, Biomedical informatics, and machine learning, with the goal of understanding biological and medical data. It can be viewed as the study and application of data science to solve biomedical problems. Modern biomedical datasets often have specific features which make their analyses difficult, including:
