This week, the International Society for Computational Biology said that David Eisenberg and Goncalo Abecasis have won the 2013 Senior Scientist award and Overton Prize Award respectively.
Eisenberg is professor of chemistry, biochemistry, and biological chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the director of the Institute for Genomics and Proteomics which is jointly run by UCLA and the US Department of Energy. He studies protein interactions by X-ray crystallography, bioinformatics, and biochemistry, with an emphasis on amyloid-forming proteins.
Abecasis is a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. He has developed computational and statistical approaches for analyzing human variation and disease. He works on using linkage disequilibrium derived from high-throughput data to map complex disease susceptibility genes. His lab is working to identify genes involved in diabetes, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and other age-related traits.
Both honorees are scheduled to deliver keynote lectures at the 2013 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference to be held in July in Berlin, Germany.
The Senior Scientist Award recognizes members of the computational biology community who have made major contributions to the field of computational biology through research, education, and service. The Overton Prize is awarded annually to an emerging scientist in the early to middle stage of their career.
Real Time Genomics has tapped Eugene Myers, the director of the Center for Systems Biology at the Max Planck Institute, Dresden, to serve on its scientific advisory board.
Myers was one of the developers of the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Basic Local Alignment Search Tools, or BLAST. He also helped develop the whole-genome shotgun protocol and assembler that was used by Celera Genomics to assemble the human genome. He's currently researching ways to analyze and extract information from images obtained by various forms of microscopy.
In the past, he's served as a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus and as vice president of informatics research at Celera. He's also held faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Myers obtained a BS in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.