Center for Quantitative Genome Function: Scientific Advisory Board
Maynard Olson
Maynard Olson, Ph.D. is Professor of Genome Sciences and of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at The University of Washington in Seattle, where he also serves as Director of the Genome Center. He will Chair the Board. Dr. Olson was trained as a chemist at California Institute of Technology and Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry. Dr. Olson recognized early on that sequencing the human genome could provide the key to the prevention and treatment of disease. As a pilot project for human-genome analysis, he launched an ultimately successful effort to construct a detailed physical map of the yeast genome in 1979; the yeast mapping was the first "genome project" directed at the complete analysis of a cellular genome. Since then, Dr. Olson has participated extensively in the formulation of policy for the Human Genome Project. He also served for four years on the National Human Genome Research Institute Council. Dr. Olson was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal in 1992, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, received the City of Medicine Award for exceptional contributions to medicine in the public interest in 2000, and in 2002, received the Gairdner Foundation International Award for his scientific contributions to the Human Genome Project.
Richard Karp
Richard Karp, Ph.D is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Departments of Bioengineering, and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and Mathematics. He received his BA, MS and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Dr. Karp was among the first to recognize the importance of Stephen Cook's concept of NP-completeness. Building on Cook's work, in a very influential and groundbreaking 1972 paper, Karp showed the NP-completeness of 21 fundamental problems whose computational complexity had been open for years. Since then, Karp has made many fundamental contributions to theoretical computer science, most recently in the area of computational biology. Dr. Karp has received the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Turing Award, the Fulkerson Prize, the von Neumann Theory Prize, the Lanchester Prize, and the von Neumann Lectureship. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Melissa Franklin
Melissa Franklin, Ph.D. an experimental particle physicist, is Professor of Physics at Harvard University. She received a B.S. from the University of Toronto, a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. She has worked for the past eighteen years on an experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago called the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) designed to study the interactions of quarks and gluons by colliding protons with anti-protons. This experiment discovered new particles expected in theory, like the top quark, the sixth and last quark, and has prospects of finding new and unexpected particles and forces. Her work has centered on the top quark (which CDF discovered in 1995) and various aspects of electroweak physics, including the precision measurement of the W mass.
Daniel T. Gillespie
Daniel T. Gillespie, Ph.D., a widely respected mathematical chemist, is a pioneer in stochastic methods for modeling chemical kinetics. Dr. Gillespie received his B.A. in Physics from Rice University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation was in the field of high energy physics. From 1968-71 he was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland's Institute for Molecular Physics, where he did research in classical kinetic theory with Professor Jan Sengers. In 1971 he became a Research Physicist in the Earth & Planetary Sciences Division of the Naval Weapons Center (now the Naval Air Warfare Center) in China Lake, California. Later at that institution he was Head of the Applied Mathematics Research Group, and finally a Senior Scientist in the Research Department. Since his retirement from Civil Service in 2001, Dr. Gillespie has been a private consultant in Castaic, California. In that capacity he works with Professor John Doyle of the California Institute of Technology and Professor Linda Petzold of the University of California at Santa Barbara. More recently, he began to work with Dr. Larry Lok at MSI. In all these collaborations, his research is aimed generally at developing improved methods for numerically simulating biochemical systems. Dr. Gillespie has authored or co-authored 65 research journal articles on a variety of topics in physics and chemistry, most of which are concerned with physical applications of stochastic process theory and Monte Carlo methods. He is also the author of two technical books: "A Quantum Mechanics Primer," and "Markov Processes: An Introduction for Physical Scientists."
Natalie Ahn
Natalie Ahn, Ph.D. is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Colorado, Boulder, and Associate Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Seattle, Washington, and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work centers on trying to understand how phosphorylation controls cell signal transduction by identifying protein kinases and phosphatases controlled by growth factors and examining their mechanisms of regulation. She is also developing new methods to profile protein responses to signal transduction pathways and analyze post-translational modifications of proteins involved in signaling.
Paul Sternberg
Paul Sternberg, Ph.D. is Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Cell and Neurobiology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, Los Angeles. Dr. Sternberg graduated from Hampshire College and received a Ph.D. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His graduate work on the Genetic Control of Nematode Development was under the supervision of H. Robert Horvitz. He then did postdoctoral research on yeast mating type with Ira Herskowitz at the University of California, San Francisco, and returned to C. elegans when he joined Caltech. He is now lead-PI of WormBase, an international consortium of biologists and computer scientists dedicated to providing the research community with accurate, current, accessible information on the genetics, genomics and biology of C. elegans and some related nematodes.
Rebecca Ward
Rebecca Ward, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. This Department is the first entirely new department at Harvard Medical School in over twenty years. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Ward was Director of Research Affairs, Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology. Dr. Ward founded Chemistry & Biology, the first journal devoted to chemical biology, as well as helping to launch several other journals (including Structure and Current Biology.) She received her editorial training while working as an Assistant Editor at Nature. Dr. Ward received her BA in biochemistry from Cambridge University, where she also received her Ph.D. in Immunology. |