DATA-ENABLED LIFE SCIENCES ALLIANCE

DELSA Co-Founders

DELSA Co-Founders

 

Ilkay Altintas, PhD (Cyberinfrastructure, Workflows) is the Director for the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD where she also is the Deputy Coordinator for Research. She currently works on different aspects of scientific workflows in collaboration with various cross-disciplinary NSF, DOE and Moore Foundation projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to eScience at the intersection of scientific workflows, provenance, distributed computing, bioinformatics, observatory systems, conceptual data querying, and software modeling.

Peter Arzberger, PhD (Biological sciences, Cyberinfrastructure) Dr. Arzberger is the founding Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), an NSF-funded activity advancing the use of grid technologies throughout Pacific Rim institutions. In addition, he is the Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR), focusing on advanced computational technology to better enable biomedical research.

Reed Beaman, PhD (Biodiversity, Plant sciences, Informatics) Reed is Curator of Informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) at the University of Florida. The FLMNH informatics lab develops data management infrastructure to support phylogenetic and systematics research, and the tracking, linking, and querying of specimen vouchers and derivative products to taxonomy, images, genetic resources, geospatial data, and other resources.

Phil Bourne, PhD (Informatics, Pharmacology, Education) Philip E. Bourne is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and is also Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Computational Biology. His professional interests focus on relevant research and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication.

Neil Davies, PhD (Ecology, Education, Engineering) As director of the UCB Gump Station, he represents the University of California in French Polynesia, overseeing the University's operations and staff in Moorea and is responsible for developing world-class research, educational, and public outreach programs, to establish Moorea as a leading model ecosystem. The programs aim to: (1) discover processes underlying tropical biocomplexity, particularly in coral reef systems, and (2) translate this knowledge into sustainable development through innovative eco-engineering tools and management approaches.

Drexel DeFord, MS, MPA (Information Services, Cyberinfrastructure, Management) Mr. DeFord serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Steward Health Care in Boston, MA. He was previously serving as SVP, CIO and CTO in numerous Health Care organizations, including some with the United States Air Force, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. He has several publications and presentations to his credit, and is currently serving as the Chair of College of Healthcare Information Management Executives’ (CHIME) Board of Trustees. A Fellow in both CHIME and HIMSS, Drex has a Masters in Health Informatics from University of Alabama, Birmingham, and a Masters in Public Administration from Oklahoma.

Jack Faris, PhD (Communication, Management, Science policies) Jack is currently CEO of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute and is the immediate past president of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, where he developed and led a comprehensive strategy to grow the life-sciences sector statewide. Most recently, he’s been involved with organizations such as the Washington Global Health Alliance, the Initiative for Global Development’s National Summit on global poverty, and the Rural Development Institute.

Wu Feng, PhD (Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Green Computing). Wu-Chun Feng is an Elizabeth & James E. Turner Associate Professor in the Depts. of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering, and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Depts. of Cancer Biology and Translational Science Institute in the School of Medicine at Wake Forest University. He directs the Synergy Laboratory and serves as a site co-director for the NSF Center on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing. His research interests in efficient parallel and data-intensive computing sit at the synergistic intersection of computer architecture, systems software, middleware, and applications software and ranges from core computer science research to highly interdisciplinary research, most notably, in the life sciences.

Geoffrey Fox, PhD (Computer sciences, Cyberinfrastructure) Geoffrey is now a distinguished Professor of Informatics and Computing, and Physics at Indiana University where he is Director of the Digital Science Center and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the School of Informatics and Computing. He currently works in applying computer science to Bioinformatics, Defense, Earthquake and Ice-sheet Science, Particle Physics and Chemical Informatics.

Peter Fox, PhD (Solar physics, Ocean and environmental informatics) Peter is currently PI for the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO), the Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration, and Semantic Provenance Capture in Data Ingest Systems projects at Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research specializes in the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, computational and computer science, information technology, and grid-enabled, distributed semantic data frameworks.

Dmitrij Frishman, PhD (Bioinformatics, Structural Genomics) is professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Munich and a group leader at the Institute for Bioinformatics (MIPS) at the German National Center for Health and Environment. He developed widely used structure prediction and analysis tools (PREDATOR, STRIDE) and initiated the field of computational structural genomics. In 1996 he started the PEDANT genome database which is currently one of the largest publicly accessible resources of automatic genome annotation. His current research interests include protein interactions, data mining, and structural genomics.

Christy Jo Geraci, PhD (Systematics, Aquatic ecology, Science policies) Dr. Geraci is a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow focusing on cyberinfrastructure and data management policy at NSF in the Biological Sciences Directorate, Division of Biological Infrastructure as well as a Research Collaborator at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Her current research involves building and using DNA barcode reference libraries and voucher collections to expedite the discovery, description, and association of aquatic insects useful for monitoring water quality in North America and in the Tigris/Euphrates Watershed.

Jack Gilbert, PhD (Ecology, Marine microbiology) Dr. Gilbert is a Senior Environmental Microbiologist at Argonne National Laboratory, adjunct Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at University of Chicago, fellow of the Institute of Genomic and Systems Biology, and affiliated with the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences. Dr. Gilbert has research interests in microbial community ecology and marine microbiology.

Corinna Gries, PhD (Environmental sciences, Eco-informatics) For the last 15 years Corinna has worked at the interface of environmental sciences, ecology, biodiversity, and eco-informatics as information manager within the NSF funded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network; originally at the Global Institute of Sustainability for the Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER site and now for the North Temperate Lakes LTER site at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She currently leads the NSF funded SYMBIOTA project with its various biodiversity and informatics portals.

Rob Knight, PhD (Environmental sciences, Molecular evolution) Rob is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, and an HHMI Early Career Scientist as well as holding secondary appointments as Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO and Associate Professor, Department of Preventative Medicine and Biometrics, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. Dr. Knight currently studies RNA evolution and microbiomes in diverse ecological and environmental systems.

Eugene Kolker, PhD (Biological sciences, Informatics) Eugene is Chief Data Officer at the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Head of the Bioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis Laboratory at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and is the co-founder of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology and serves as its Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Kolker has more than 25 years of interdisciplinary experience in highly integrated tools development, data analysis, integration and dissemination, biomedical and operational analytics, molecular cellular biology, statistics, and informatics.

Doron Lancet, PhD (Genomics, Bioinformatics, Evolution, Israel). Head of the Crown Human Genome Center at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Involved in gene discovery for monogenic and polygenic diseases, in pharmacogenetics and in human olfactory genetics. Developed the GeneCards compendium of human genes, used worldwide in academia and industry alike, as well as MalaCards, a comprehensive database for human diseases. Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and serving on the Human Genome Organization council.

Trudie Lang, MD (Global health, Clinical sciences, U.K.) Dr. Lang is the head of the Global Health Network, Global Health Trials, and Global Heath Reviewers. Trudie is also head of Clinical Trial Research Programme and Group in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford. Her main goal is to promote and make easier the conduct of non-commercial clinical research across all diseases in resource-poor settings.

Biaoyang Lin, PhD (Genomics, Health sciences, China) Dr. Lin is the Director of the Systems Biology Division, Zhejiang-California International Nanosystems Institute (ZCNI), Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, as well as an Affiliate Professor at the ZCNI. Dr. Lin’s long-term research interests lie in applying genomics, proteomics and systems biology approaches to understand cancers, to identify biomarkers and to develop novel therapeutic approaches for cancers.

Neo Martinez, PhD (Computational Ecology, Sustainability) Neo is the founder and director of the independent nonprofit Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab in Berkeley, CA. He is an internationally recognized leader in ecology and network science with extensive expertise in the structure and stability of ecological networks and their sustainability in the face of biodiversity loss and global change.

Folker Meyer, PhD (Cyberinfrastructure, Informatics) Folker is a computational biologist at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. His current work focuses on the large scale analyses of shotgun metagenomics data sets and on building the MG-RAST community resource for metagenomics.

Vural Özdemir, PhD, MD, DABCP (Global Health, Clinical Pharmacology and Public Policy) Vural is Associate Professor at Faculty of Medicine, and Senior Scholar at Faculty of Management, McGill University, Canada. He has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on clinical pharmacology and the translation continuum from discovery science to global health, bioethics, policy and social science dimensions of rational therapeutics. His research and writing are concerned with innovation for clinical pharmacology in 21st century healthcare; citizen science; novel funding strategies for user innovation such as micro-grants, crowd-funding and citizen philanthropy; translation of Big Data and clinical pharmacology to global health innovation; and post-genomics innovation strategy in clinical pharmacology. Vural is Editor-in-Chief for OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.

Michael Snyder, PhD (Genomics, Personalized Medicine) is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and currently carries out a variety of projects in the areas of genomics and proteomics both in yeast and humans. These include the large-scale analysis of proteins using protein microarrays and the global mapping of the binding sites of chromosomal proteins. His laboratory built the first proteome chip for any organism and the first high resolution tiling array for the entire human genome.

Sanjeeva Srivastava, PhD (Bioengineering, Proteomics, India) Sanjeeva is the Group Leader for the Proteomics Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay India (IITB), and a Visiting Scientist at the Biodesign Institute, Arizona. His research focuses on biomarker and drug target discovery, deciphering the protein interaction networks in complex human diseases (e.g., gliomas) and infectious diseases (e.g., malaria) using proteomics, nano-proteomics, protein microarrays, and mass spectrometry.