George (Woody) Beeler is the principal of Beeler Consulting LLC, and a member of the Emeritus Staff of Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. Beeler Consulting provides management consulting services in health care data management and EDI. Previous to retirement, he was Division Chair of Information Architecture and Technology at Mayo, involved in systems architecture, data administration, development technology, and standards. He joined Mayo in 1967 to research the application of computers to biomedical research. He assumed responsibility for the Section of Information Processing and Systems of Mayo Clinic in 1980, and became a Division Chair in 1991.
Dr. Beeler is a senior member of the Health Information and Management Systems Society, a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, of the American Medical Informatics Association and of several standards organizations. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Health Level Seven (HL7), an ANSI-accredited developer of health information interchange standards, and a Past-Chair of that Board.
Global Head of Systems Biology, Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research
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Prof. Manuel C. Peitsch, Ph.D. is the Global Head of Systems Biology at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research since May 2005. In this position, he directs a department spanning experimental sciences (Proteomics), Computational Systems Biology, Computational Knowledge Management and Text Mining as well as Information Sciences.
Prior to his current position, Manuel was Global Head of Informatics and Knowledge Management. From 2001 until 2005, he was responsible for Research IT, Scientific Computing and Knowledge Management in Research. Prior to joining Novartis, Manuel held several positions with GlaxoWellcome and GlaxoSmithKline. When he joined the industry in 1994 he was responsible for setting up Bioinformatics at the Glaxo Institute for Molecular Biology in Geneva. From 1997 to 2000 he was global head of Scientific Computing for GlaxoWellcome and in 2000 he became global head of Informatics and Knowledge Management for GSK R&D.
In 1997 Manuel has co-founded the start-up company Geneva Bioinformatics and a new research site for GlaxoWellcome in Geneva. In 1998 he co-founded the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and later plaid a crucial role in extending this institute to Basel. In 2003 he co-founded the SwissBioGRID.
Over the past 20 years Manuel published over 100 paper, book chapters, technical reports and patents. He made his most important contributions in the fields of bioinformatics, protein structure modeling (incl. Swiss-Model internet-based protein modeling server) and cell death research. He is also the recipient of several honors and awards.
Manuel obtained his M.S. (Biology and Physical Chemistry) and Ph.D. (Biochemistry) from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He spent his post-doctoral years at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH (Dr. J. V. Maizel Jr) and at the University of Lausanne (Prof. J. Tschopp). Since 2002 he is a professor for Bioinformatics with the University of Basel.
In addition to his work at Novartis, Manuel serves on the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, on the Foundation Council of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and on the Steering Boards of the Swiss Supercomputing Centre and the SwissBioGRID.
Dr Martin Hoffmann completed his PhD on role of glycoproteins on tumour progression at the Institute of Genetics and Toxicology (ITG) of Kernforschungs-zentrum Karlsruhe (Nuclear Research Centre, Karlsruhe). During the period 1991 till 1994, he was involved in various postdoctoral work at Institute of Genetics (Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe), Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), focusing on cancer and immune research.
In 1994, Dr Martin is appointed group leader at ITG and in 1998, he moved on to LION Bioscience AG to be the director for Functional Genomics. Dr Martin was subsequently also nominated Director Nuclear Receptor Research Group and Executive Project Director Expression Analysis. Dr Martin joined Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing as the Head for Department of Bioinformatics in 2002.
A/Prof Kolatkar did his doctoral research program at University of Texas on "Structure and Function of Invertebrate Hemoglobins" and his postdoctoral research at Purdue University on "Structural Studies and Function of ICAM-1". In 1997, A/Prof Kolatkar moved to Singapore and became a Principal Investigator at Bioinformatics Centre, National University of Singapore / Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. A/Prof Kolatkar hereby led projects involving rendering of dynamic metabolic pathways to integrate Bioinformatics tools and also projects involving structural characterization of molecules with medical potential derived from species indigenous to ASEAN.
In 2001, A/Prof Kolatkar proceeded to become a group leader at Genome Institute of Singapore to undertake projects in X-ray crystallography of molecules involved in stem cell and cancer pathways, implementing systems for information collection and mining for Biological function, including protein interactions and functional classification.
The awards that A/Prof Kolatkar garnered include EAKIN Award for Research Excellence (Graduate Research) in 1991, Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund For Medical Research Fellowship (Post-doc) in 1992 and Outstanding University Research Award, National University of Singapore in 1999.
Professor, School of Computing & School of Medine National University of Singapore
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Wong Lim Soon is a professor in the School of Computing and the School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. Before that, he was the Deputy Executive Director for Research at A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research. He is currently working mostly on knowledge discovery technologies and is especially interested in their application to biomedicine. Prior to that, he has done significant research in database query language theory and finite model theory, as well as significant development work in broad-scale data integration systems. Lim Soon has written about 100 research papers, a few of which are among the best cited of their respective fields.
In recognition for his contributions to these fields, he has received several awards, the most recent being the 2003 FEER Asian Innovation Gold Award for his work on treatment optimization of childhood leukemias. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ICP), Bioinformatics (OUP), and Drug Discovery Today (Elsevier). He is a scientific advisor to GeneticXchange (USA), Molecular Connections (India), and KOOPrime (Singapore). He received his BSc(Eng) in 1988 from Imperial College London and his PhD in 1994 from University of Pennsylvania.