The Bioinformatics Organization has nominated four leading American scientists for the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award. This year’s nominees are:
- Sean R. Eddy, group leader, Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia;
- Robert Gentleman, head, Program in Computational Biology, Division of Public Health Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington;
- Don Gilbert, director, Genome Informatics Lab, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; and
- Steven Salzberg, director, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
"These nominees are among the most significant advocates of open access in the life sciences and have been repeatedly nominated by the members of the Bioinformatics Organization since the inception of the Award," said organization president Jeff Bizzaro.
Members of bioinformatics.org (membership is free) may vote for the winner here.
The winner will receive the award and deliver a keynote lecture at this year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.
HHMI’s Sean Eddy is the open-source author of HMMER. Its free distribution to academic and commercial users has essentially created the use of profile Hidden Markov Models in protein sequence analysis. Eddy’s development of the Pfam family of protein domains has been an essential counterpart as the basis of genome annotations, family classification systems such as GO, and much of our common language of protein annotation. And his work on small RNAs helped catalyze a rich and exploding field. Eddy is now a principal scientist at HHMI’s Janelia Farm research facility.
Robert Gentleman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) has been pivotal in the development of the Bioconductor R module, which explores the use of statistical computing in computational biology. A firm believer in sharing data transformation methods as well as the underlying data, Gentleman started "Reproducible Research," an effort to bring literature programming concepts to scientific research, resulting in documents that bring together a journal article, the experimental data, and the source code that is used to produce the results and figures. This philosophy is deeply ingrained in the Bioconductor system.
Indiana University’s Don Gilbert is nominated for doing something that no other person in his time did. His contribution to the bioinformatics community is enormous but under-appreciated. He established the IUBio Archive and developed one of the first Internet interfaces to GenBank. Moreover, he helped develop and maintain the BIOSCI/Bionet public biology news and discussion groups. He also developed the widely used programs readseq, SeqPup, and Generic Model Organism Database tools. Additionally, he has contributed to biological databases, including Bio-Mirror; euGenes, a multiple eukaryote genome summary; and DroSpeGe and FlyBase, Drosophila genome databases.
Formerly a senior scientist at The Institute for Genomic Research, Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland) is a leading advocate of open-source software release and a vocal proponent of free sharing of data among scientists. He has argued for unrestricted access to genome data, the importance of sharing data in beating the influenza threat, and published an editorial in Bioinformatics about ending the patenting of software. Together with more than 70 scientists from 34 countries, Salzberg co-signed a letter to Nature from the GISAID consortium supporting the rapid release of avian influenza data. His group has contributed many open-access software tools for sequence analysis, genome assembly and large-scale genome alignment (e.g. Glimmer, JIGSAW, MUMer, AMOS, VEIL, and BAMBUS. And he was instrumental in helping create the NCBI Assembly Archive, a repository where scientists can share the complete detail of genome assemblies.
Email Kevin Davies.
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