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| Hinxton,
Monday, 28 February 2005 |
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| Double recognition of EBI scientists by the ISCB |
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| Janet
Thornton |
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| Ewan
Birney |
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Press
Release 28 February 2005 [PDF]
The International Society for
Computational Biology has named two scientists from the
European Bioinformatics Institute as the winners of its
awards for 2005. Janet Thornton wins the Senior Scientist
Accomplishment Award while the Overton Prize goes to
Ewan Birney.
Thomas Lengauer, the ISCB's newest Awards Committee
member, says "Janet Thornton could be described as Miss
Structural Bioinformatics. She has made outstanding and
seminal research contributions to her field and, as director
of the EBI and the coordinator of the BioSapiens Network
of Excellence, has selflessly dedicated herself to
developing the research landscape in computational
biology. Ewan Birney is the driving force behind Ensembl,
arguably the most widely used genome browser in the
world".
The ISCB's Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award, first
given in 2003 to David Sankoff [University of Ottawa] and
then in 2004 to David Lipman [US National Center for
Biotechnology Information, Bethesda, USA], recognizes
established members of the computational biology
community who have made major contributions to the field
through research, education, service, or a combination of
the three.
Janet Thornton's contributions certainly fall into all three of
these categories. Janet first began to collect information
about protein structures when she joined the laboratory of
David Phillips in Oxford in the 1970s. In 1980 she moved to
work in Tom BlundellÍs department at Birkbeck College,
London. During this time, she wrote many programmes to
analyse several aspects of protein structures, and she
developed a hierarchical system of protein structure
classification. After she had taken up a chair at University
College London in 1990, this system evolved into the CATH
database, and is now one of the world's most widely used
protein structure databases. She was also the founding
Chief Scientific Officer of Inpharmatica, a company that
develops informatics-based approaches to drug discovery.
Janet has been Director of the EBI since October 2001. Her
active research group focuses on using computational
approaches to understand biology [especially proteins] at
the molecular level, and her research combines the use of
genomic, transcriptomic, structural and metabolomic data
with the aim of discovering how molecules interact to
perform their functions, and how these functions evolved.
Under her directorship, the EBI has expanded into several
new research areas and has secured funding to provide
space for its burgeoning staff base. She works tirelessly to
raise awareness of the need for a stable bioinformatics
infrastructure in Europe. BioSapiens, the European-Unionfunded
Network of Excellence that she coordinates, is
enabling bioinformaticians throughout Europe to work
together and with experimental biologists to annotate
genome data. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a
Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a
Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences
and a Commander of the British Empire.
The Overton Prize was established in 2001 by the ISCB in
memory of G. Christian Overton, a major contributor to the
field of bioinformatics and member of the ISCB Board of Directors who died unexpectedly in 2000. The prize is
awarded for outstanding accomplishment to a scientist in
the early- to mid-stage of his or her career who has already
made a significant contribution to the field of computational
biology. Previous recipients are Uri Alon [Weizmann
Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel], W. James Kent
[University of California, Santa Cruz, USA], David Baker
[University of Washington, Seattle, USA] and Christopher
Burge [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston,
USA].
Ewan Birney trained as a biochemist at Oxford University,
and did a Ph.D. in gene prediction with Richard Durbin at
the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, right next door to the
EBI. He moved to the EBI in 2000 to coordinate the EBI's
contribution to Ensembl, a joint project with the Sanger
Institute to provide a comprehensive, automatically
generated annotation for the genomes of higher animals.
Ensembl is widely used by biomedical researchers, serving
around a million pages a week, and has been used to
generate gene sets for several genomes, including human,
mouse, rat and chicken.
In a collaboration with Lincoln Stein at the Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory [NY, USA], Ewan's team also produces
Reactome – a knowledgebase of human biological
pathways. Other collaborations include the ENCODE
project, a detailed gene anatomy of a specified region of
the human genome; and the BioSapiens Network of
Excellence.
Ewan actively supports the open source movement.
"Making software source code and scientific data freely
available is the best way to ensure scientific progress", he
says. He is co-leader of the open-source bioinformatics
toolkit Bioperl and president of the Open Bioinformatics
Foundation, which supports the development of several
bioinformatics toolkits. The news of his Overton prize came
hot on the heels of the announcement that he has won the
2005 Benjamin Frankin Award, which recognizes scientists
who advocate open access to programmes and other
materials in the bioinformatics arena. This yearÍs Benjamin
Franklin Award will be presented at the annual meeting of
Bioinformatics.Org in Boston on 19 May.
The ISCB selects its award winners each year by soliciting
nominations from the computational biology community.
The ISCB Awards Committee then meets to review the
merits of all nominees and unanimously decides on a
recommendation of the winners to present to the ISCB
Executive Committee for approval.
Janet and Ewan will give their keynote addresses at the
2005 'Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology' [ISMB]
meeting, in Detroit, Michigan, June 25Æ29. "Ewan and I are
both thrilled that the bioinformatics community has
honoured us in this way", says Janet Thornton; "the ISCB's
unprecedented decision to award both prizes to scientists
from one institute also reflects the importance of
organizations like the EBI, which collect, store and
distribute information for the research community."
Press Contact Cath Brooksbank PhD
EMBL-EBI Scientific Outreach Officer Wellcome Trust
Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK
Tel: +44 [0]1223 492525,
E-mail: cath@ebi.ac.uk
Trista Dawson
EMBL Press Officer, European Molecular Biology Laboratory,
Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel: +49 [0] 6221 3878452
E-mail: trista.dawson@embl.de |
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