2017 Benjamin Franklin Award Winner Announced

By Bio-IT World Staff

April 4, 2017 | The members of Bioinformatics.org have chosen Rafael Irizarry of Harvard University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute as the laureate of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences.

The ceremony for the presentation of the award will be held at the 2017 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar.

In the words of his nominators, Irizarry has dedicated his career to developing methods and open source software for helping researcher’s genomics data. As a Biostatistician, he has made fundamental advances in the science of analyzing large, noisy, and biased genomics datasets. His contributions are particularly crucial in an era where archives are filling with tens of thousands of large open datasets; to re-use and combine these in any effective way requires a careful approach that considers technical confounders, batch effects, and other issues. See e.g. his work on Frozen robust multiarray analysis (fRMA) and The Gene Expression Barcode.