David Gilbert is Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computing Science, and Director of the Bioinformatics Research Centre. He holds an MSc and PhD in Computing from Imperial College, London where his research was into modelling concurrent systems using computational logic, and was a member of the team which developed the PARLOG parallel logic programming system. David was an EPSRC Research Fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute in 1998, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2000) in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UCL when he worked on the design and development of the TOPS protein topology computational system.
His current research activities include developing computational models of protein topology and associated pattern discovery methods for protein classification, methods to represent and analyse biochemical pathways, and the use of Grid technologies to support eScience for bioinformatics. The main computational approaches he uses are machine learning, graph theory and concurrency analysis. David is the co-chair of the ECCB04 and ISMB04 joint Bioinformatics Conferences (Glasgow 2004).
Mark Girolami (Reader) is Deputy Director of the Bioinformatics Research Centre. He joined the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow in April 2004 to take up an academic post in Bioinformatics. Prior to this he held the Chair of Applied Computational Intelligence at the University of Paisley and was Associate Head of School. In 2000, Dr. Girolami was the TEKES visiting professor at the Laboratory of Computing and Information Science in Helsinki University of Technology. In 1998 and 1999 Dr. Girolami was a research fellow at the Laboratory for Advanced Brain Signal Processing in the Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Wako-Shi, Japan. He has been a visiting researcher at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory (CNL) of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he generalised the classical 'Infomax' algorithm enabling the isolation of significant neurobiological signatures from EEG measurements.
Mark Girolami holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Glasgow (1985), and a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Paisley (1998). Dr. Girolami was a development engineer with IBM from 1985 until 1995 when he left to pursue an academic career.
Pawel Herzyk is Head of Bioinformatics in the Sir Henry Wellcome Functional Genomics Facility (SHWFGF) at the University of Glasgow, UK. He holds MSc in Technical Physics from Warsaw University of Science and Technology, as well as PhD in Biophysical Sciences from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Warsaw. He has previously worked in Birkbeck College and the Institute of Cancer Research on molecular dynamics simulation of DNA and DNA-drug complexes. Subsequently, he worked in the Department of Chemistry, University of York on protein structure determination from NMR/NOE data as well as on developing methods for modelling protein structure. In particular, he has developed a unique methodology for determination of the structure of helical transmembrane domains from the variety of experimental and theoretical information, which was successfully applied to number of proteins including G-protein-coupled receptor rhodopsin as revealed by its recently determined high-resolution 3-D structure. His current research concentrates on issues related to the analysis of microarray and proteomics data as well as modelling 3-D structure of membrane proteins, promoter analysis and identification of distant homologs in proteins.
David Leader is Grieve Lecturer in Physiological Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He studied at Oxford University, where after a first degree in Chemistry he did a D.Phil. in the area of hormonal control of gene expression. He also holds an MSc in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow. He has previously worked on mammalian protein biosynthesis, the phosphorylation of ribosomal proteins, and on the protein kinases of large DNA viruses. Davids main bioinformatics interest is in developing software tools for molecular biological visualizations. He is involved in several projects concerned
James Milner-White is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics. His BSc and PhD in Biochemistry are from Aberdeen and London. Following a period as an enzymologist working on creatine kinase, James changed to investigating protein 3D structures on computer. His current research focuses on novel structural and chemical features of proteins, especially hydrogen-bonded motifs consisting of fewer than six amino acid residues.
One of the motifs he and colleagues have discovered, a three-residue anion-binding motif called the nest, is of special interest. There are four reasons: One is that 5-8% of all residues in an average protein are part of a nest. Secondly nests are the commonest example of polypeptides where the main chain conformations are enantiomeric (mirror images). Thirdly nests were probably important in early evolution. Fourthly nests seem to be structurally related to the soluble prefibrillar form of amyloid which is the toxic component of the amyloidoses. It is hoped this insight will lead to new drugs against these diseases.
Richard Sinnott is a Professorial Research Fellow and the Technical Director of the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow. He is responsible for establishing an environment for e-Science at Glasgow University. This includes provision of the necessary computational infrastructure as well as the training and education of future e-Scientists. At Glasgow he is the course director and lecturer on the Grid Computing course - the first full course offered in the UK on Grid Computing. He holds a BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of East Anglia, and an MSc in Software Engineering and a PhD (distributed systems) from the University of Strirling. Previously he has worked at the GMD Fokus, Berlin in software engineering for distributed, telecomms and network management systems. Richard's research focus in Bioinformatics is in the application of eScience and Grid technologies, and he is the co-project leader for the BRIDGES project which is investigating data federation and security issues of biomedical data.
Juris Viksna holds a BSc in Mathematics and an MSc and PhD in the mathematical foundations of Computer Science from the University of Latvia. He is an EPSRC funded visiting research fellow at the Bioinformatics Research Centre, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Latvia. His research interests focus on computational learning and the application of graph theory in Bioinformatics, and he is the author of several algorithms for fast protein topology structure matching and motif discovery.