Academic Year 2005-2006

Jeffrey Skolnick, Ph.D.

"Prediction of Protein Structure, Function and Druggability on a Proteomic Scale"

Professor and Director of the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics
The State University of New York at Buffalo

url: www.bioinformatics.buffalo.edu/ current_buffalo/skolnick/people/jeff.html
e-mail: skolnick@buffalo.edu

Leslie Orgel, Ph.D.

"The Origin of the RNA World"

Professor of Chemical Evolution
Salk Institute for Biological Studies

url: http://www.salk.edu/faculty/faculty/details.php?id=39
e-mail: orgel@salk.edu

Terrence Sejnowski, Ph.D.

"The Secret Lives of Cells"

Professor and Director of the Computational Neurobiology Lab
Salk Institute for Biological Studies

url: http://www.salk.edu/faculty/faculty/details.php?id=48
e-mail: sejnowski@salk.edu

Soren Brunak, DPhil, Ph.D.

"Temporal Interactome for the Eukaryotic Cell Cycle by Data Integration"
 
Professor and Director of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis
BioCentrum-DTU, Technical University of Denmark

url: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/show-staff.php?id=514
e-mail: brunak@cbs.dtu.dk

Stephen Altschul, Ph.D.

"The Compositional Adjustment of Amino Acid Substitution Matrices"

Professor of the Computational Biology Branch
National Center for Biotechnology Information; National Library of Medicine;
and National Institutes of Health

url: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Altschul/
e-mail: altschul@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.

"Interior Grounding and Self-Conscious Reflection -- Three Possibly New Theories of Intelligence"

Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

url: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
e-mail: minsky@media.mit.edu



Academic Year 2004-2005

Pavel A. Pevzner, Ph.D.

"Transforming Mice into Men"

Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science
University of California, San Diego

Research Interests:
Computational Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics.

url: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/ppevzner/
email: ppevzner@cs.ucsd.edu


Gene W. Myers, Ph.D.

"Whole Genome Sequencing, Comparative Genomics, and Systems Biology"

Professor of Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests:
Design of algorithms, pattern matching, computer graphics and computational molecular biology.

url: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gene/
email: gene@eecs.berkeley.edu


Stephen Smale, Ph.D.

"Learning Theory"

Professor Emeritus, Dept's of Mathematics and Economics
University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests:
Complexity and computation, algorithms, numerical analysis, global analysis.

url: http://math.berkeley.edu/~smale/
email: smale@math.berkeley.edu


Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.

"Interpreting Genomic Information"

Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
Director, Whitehead Center for Genome Research; Director, The Broad Institute/MIT & Harvard

Research Interests:
Creating tools for genomic medicine and making them broadly available to the scientific community and applying these tools to propel the understanding and treatment of disease.

url: http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/facultyareas/facresearch/lander.shtml
email: lander@genome.wi.mit.edu


James E. Ferrell, Jr., M.D., Ph.D.

"Building a Cell Cycle Oscillator: New Lessons from the Frog Egg"

Professor, Dept's of Molecular Pharmacology and Biochemistry
Stanford University

Research Interests:
Cell signaling and cell cycle regulation.

url: http://biochemistry.stanford.edu/Ferrell.html
email: james.ferrell@stanford.edu


Academic Year 2003-2004


Russ Altman, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-sponsored by Cal(IT)²    

"Challenges in Knowledge Management and Discovery in Biology"

Associate Professor of Genetics and Medicine and Computer Science
Director of Biomedical Informatics Training Program Stanford University Medical Center

Research Interests:
Application of computing technologies to basic molecular biological problems, now referred to as bioinformatics; analysis of protein and RNA structure and function, both in an individual problem-centered manner and on a functional genomic scale.

url: http://smi-web.stanford.edu/people/altman/
email: russ.altman@stanford.edu

Michael Arbib, Ph.D.
Co-sponsored by Cal(IT)²

"Wrapping the Brain: From Brain Operating Principles to Computer Technology"

Fletcher Jones Professor & Chairman of Computer Science
Director, USC Brain Project University of Southern California

Research Interests:
Mechanisms underlying the coordination of perception and action. studied at two levels: via schema theory, which is applicable both in top-down analyses of brain function and human cognition as well as in studies of machine vision and robotics; and through the detailed analysis of neural networks.

url: http://www-hbp.usc.edu/people/arbib.htm
email: arbib@pollux.usc.edu
Selected Bibliography: http://www.igb.uci.edu/events/distinguished_speakers_arbib.html

Jonathan Moreno, Ph.D.
Co-sponsored by the Newkirk Center

"The History and Ethics of Human Experiments"

Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics
Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics - University of Virginia Health System

Research Interests:
Bioethics and moral consensus, ethics in clinical practice, arguing euthanasia, and secret state experiments on humans.

url: http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/bio-ethics/morenobio.cfm
email: jdm8n@virginia.edu

Fred Cohen, M.D., D.Phil.    

"Prions, Protein Misfolding and Pharmaceutical Interventions"

Professor, Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Biophysics
University of California, San Francisco

Research Interests:
Computationally predicting protein localization in the malaria parasite, correlating and connecting malarial metabolic pathways to genome array data, and examining the yeast SH3 signaling mechanism through computational means.

url: http://www.cmpharm.ucsf.edu/cohen/
email: cohen@cmpharm.ucsf.edu

Mark Borodovsky, Ph.D.
Co-sponsored by Cal(IT)²

"Unsupervised Model Training for DNA Sequence Analysis Algorithms"

Director, Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
Regents' Professor, Schools of Biology and Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Research Interests:
Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics and developing new algorithms for biological data analysis.

url: http://www.biology.gatech.edu/professors/borodov.html
email: mark.borodovsky@biology.gatech.edu

C. Lee Giles, Ph.D.   

"Future Directions in Information Preservation and Aggregation - CiteSeer?"

David Reese Professor, School of Information Sciences and Technology
Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University

Research Interests:
Basic and applied research in intelligent information processing systems such as intelligent portals, novel web tools, web search and measurement; web knowledge extraction and information and data mining; digital libraries and web databases; computational issues in e-commerce and the e-world; computational markets and betting; novel applications of neural and machine learning, agents and AI in: web computing, databases, information retrieval, telecommunications, parallel and distributed computing, multi-media, computer systems, neuroscience, adaptive control, system identification, networking, pattern recognition and signal processing, language processing, time series and finance; hybrid intelligent systems and foundations thereof; and effective integration of learning, AI and agents into actual systems.

url: http://clgiles.ist.psu.edu/
email: giles@ist.psu.edu

Clarence J. Peters, M.D.
Co-sponsored by the Newkirk Center   

"Technological vs Societal Responses to Viral Threats"

Director, Center for Bio-Defense; Professor, Dept. of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology
The University of Texas Medical Branch

Research Interests:
Pathogenesis and epidemiology of the viral hemorrhagic fevers.

url: http://www.utmb.edu/pathology/administration/faculty/details.asp?who=cjpeters&printversion=1
email: cjpeters@utmb.edu

Tomaso Poggio, Ph.D.   

"Learning Theory and Applications"

Investigator, McGovern Institute & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Eugene McDermott Professor, Brain Sciences and Human Behavior Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests:
Processes by which the brain learns to recognize and categorize visual objects; understanding higher brain function; mathematical and computer applications of statistical learning.

url: http://web.mit.edu/mcgovern/html/Principal_Investigators/poggio.shtml
email: tp@ai.mit.edu