February 24, 2009 | The Bioinformatics Organization (bioinformatics.org) has announced the names of the six nominees for the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award. The winner will be presented with the award and deliver a lecture at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, on Tuesday, April 28.
The 2008 winner, Robert Gentleman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), joined a distinguished group of bioinformatics researchers recognized by Bioinformatics.org and its some 24,000 members, dedicated to the open access of materials and data, including Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm/2007), Michael Ashburnerz (Cambridge/2006), Ewan Birney (EBI/2005), Lincoln Stein (Cold Spring Harbor/2004), James Kent (UC Santa Cruz/2003) and Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley/2002). The six finalists for the 2009 award are:
Philip E. Bourne (Co-Director, Protein Data Bank, University of California San Diego)—Bourne is the founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, and co-director of the Protein Data Bank. He continues to develop widely used software tools including SciVee, a free scientific video delivery site.
Warren DeLano (DeLano Scientific)—DeLano developed the PyMol molecular viewer application. His company aggregates resources for open source software development, efficiently channels those resources to create and share innovative tools, and provides subscription services that maximize utility for end users.
Jonathan Eisen (University of California, Davis)—Eisen writes a phylogenomics blog and he has been instrumental in pushing for the early and open release of genomic and metagenomic datasets, including the JCVI Global Oceans data.
Don Gilbert (Indiana University)—Gilbert developed the READSEQ program, euGenes database, and the Bio-Mirror project. Each project is part of the IUBio Archive of biology software and data, which he established.
Heng Li (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute)—Li was the chief developer of Maq, an open source program mapping short reads to reference sequences, and TreeSoft and TreeFam, open source softwares and a database of phylogenetic trees of animal genes.
Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland)—Salzberg produced several popular open source bioinformatics tools (MUMmer, glimmer, TransTerm, Jigsaw, etc.), and helped start the Influenza Genome Sequencing project.