The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) supports basic research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. NIGMS-funded scientists investigate how living systems work at a range of levels, from molecules and cells to tissues and organs, in research organisms, humans, and populations. Additionally, to ensure the vitality and continued productivity of the research enterprise, NIGMS provides leadership in training the next generation of scientists, in enhancing the diversity of the scientific workforce, and in developing research capacity throughout the country.
Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular modelling and visualization computer program. VMD is developed mainly as a tool to view and analyze the results of molecular dynamics simulations. It also includes tools for working with volumetric data, sequence data, and arbitrary graphics objects. Molecular scenes can be exported to external rendering tools such as POV-Ray, RenderMan, Tachyon, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and many others. Users can run their own Tcl and Python scripts within VMD as it includes embedded Tcl and Python interpreters. VMD runs on Unix, Apple Mac macOS, and Microsoft Windows. VMD is available to non-commercial users under a distribution-specific license which permits both use of the program and modification of its source code, at no charge.
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.
Jeremy Mark Berg was founding director of the University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Personalized Medicine. He holds positions as Associate Senior Vice Chancellor for Science Strategy and Planning and Professor of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2016 - 2019, Berg was editor in chief of the Science journals.
Mark Borodovsky is a Regents' Professor at the Join Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech. He has also been a Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia from 2012 to 2022.
Ruth Lillian Kirschstein was an American pathologist and science administrator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kirschstein served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, deputy director of NIH in the 1990s, and acting director of the NIH in 1993 and 2000-2002.
Philip Eric Bourne is an Australian bioinformatician, non-fiction writer, and businessman. He is currently Stephenson Chair of Data Science and Director of the School of Data Science and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and was the first associate director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, where his projects include managing the Big Data to Knowledge initiative, and formerly Associate Vice Chancellor at UCSD. He has contributed to textbooks and is a strong supporter of open-access literature and software. His diverse interests have spanned structural biology, medical informatics, information technology, structural bioinformatics, scholarly communication and pharmaceutical sciences. His papers are highly cited, and he has an h-index above 50.
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.
Geraldine Pittman Woods was an American science administrator. She is known for her lifelong dedication to community service and for establishing programs that promote minorities in STEM fields, scientific research, and basic research.
Rommie E. Amaro is a professor and endowed chair of chemistry and biochemistry and the director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on development of computational methods in biophysics for applications to drug discovery.
The Computational Biology Department (CBD) is a division within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located in the Gates-Hillman Center. Established in 2007 by Robert F. Murphy as the Lane Center for Computational Biology with funding from Raymond J. Lane and Stephanie Lane, CBD became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2016.
Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso is a Nigerian-American chemical engineer and the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Eniola-Adefeso is also a co-founder and chief scientific officer of Asalyxa Bio. Her research looks to design biocompatible functional particles for targeted drug delivery.
Amanda Randles is an American computer scientist who is the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University. Randles is an associate professor of biomedical engineering with secondary appointments in computer science, mathematics, and mechanical engineering and materials science. She is a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. Her research interests include biomedical simulation, machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing.
Stephanie L. Constant is an American immunologist and science administrator. She was an associate professor at George Washington University and a scientific review officer at National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute before becoming chief of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences Office of Scientific Review in 2017.
Mary F. Kearney is an American biologist. She is a senior scientist and head of the translational research section in the HIV dynamics and replication program at the National Cancer Institute.
Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.
Dorothy Beckett is an American biophysicist and director of the BBCB division of NIH.
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:
Tyra Gwendolen Wolfsberg is an American bioinformatician. She is the associate director of the bioinformatics and scientific programming core at the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Alison Anne Motsinger-Reif is an American biostatistician and human geneticist specialized in association analyses, big data, and genomic analyses. In December 2018, she became the chief of the biostatistics and computational biology branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Montsinger-Reif was previously a professor of statistics at the North Carolina State University.
