Confirmed Invited Speakers

• Prof. Ziheng Yang FRS, University College London, UK
• Prof. Neil Hall, University of Liverpool, UK
• Dr. Zemin Ning, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
• Dr. David Martin, University of Dundee, UK
• Prof. Geoff Barton, University of Dundee, UK
• Dr. Daniel Barker, University of St Andrews, UK
• Prof. Ian Korf, UC Davis Genome Center, USA
• Prof. Dannie Durand, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Dr. Chris Janssen, SBF and University of Glasgow, UK
• Dr. David Ferrier, University of St Andrews, UK

Prof. Ziheng Yang FRS

Title: Detection of Darwinian Selection from Genomic Comparisons; PAML
Profile: Ziheng Yang is Professor of Statistical Genetics in the Department of Biology, University College London. After finishing his Ph. D. in Beijing Agricultural University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge, London, and the USA, before taking up a faculty position in UCL in 1997. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. He develops statistical models and write computer programs for comparative analysis of DNA and protein sequence data in molecular evolution, phylogenetics, and population genetics. His contributions include models of variable rates among sites, likelihood method of ancestral reconstruction, codon models, Bayesian method of phylogeny reconstruction, partition and mixed models for analysing multi-gene datasets, a computer program package called PAML, and a book titled Computational Molecular Evolution (Oxford, 2006). Further information about his research is available at http://abacus.gene.ucl.ac.uk/.

Prof. Neil Hall

Title: Whole genome alignment of microbial genomes
Profile: Neil Hall is Chair of Genomics at the University of Liverpool where he heads the Advanced Genomics Laboratory. He graduated with a PhD in genetics from The University of Liverpool in 1997 before undertaking his postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Arable Crop Research and The Sanger Institute. In 2004 he joined the faculty at Institute for Genomic Research then returned to Liverpool in 2007. His research has predominantly focussed on genomic adaptation in pathogens and the evolution of virulence. His group are currently developing new sequencing technologies for comparative genomic studies of microbes and plants.

Dr. Zemin Ning

Title: Sequence Alignment and Genome Assembly
Profile: Trained as an engineer, he has been working in a number of fields including Materials Modelling, Physics and Bioinformatics. Currently, a Project Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and head the group of "Sequence Assembly and Analysis". Dr Ning’s group is mainly involved in the development of informatics tools and genome data analysis.

Dr. David Martin

Title: Predicting Protein Function
Profile: After completing a Bsc in Chemistry at Kings College, London, David obtained a PhD in protein chemistry at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. This sparked a strong interest in protein structure and function which, following an EMBO Long Term fellwoship, led to a transition from the wet bench to bioinformatics as part of the EU funded GeneQuiz project. After 18 months as manager of the Norwegian EMBnet node, he moved to the University of Dundee in 2001 where he has been developing high throughput methods for functional annotation of genomes and interpretation of tandem MS spectra. More recently he is heading the UK bioinformatics effort in sequencing the potato genome.

Prof. Geoff Barton

Title: Protein Sequence Analysis and Secondary Structure Prediction with Jalview
Profile: Geoff Barton is professor of bioinformatics and co-director of the post-genomics and molecular interactions centre at the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences Research. He has published around 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is author of a number of software packages widely used in molecular biology research. After a first degree in biochemistry from the University of Manchester, he did Ph.D. Research at Birkbeck College, University of London. He then held an ICRF post-doctoral fellowship at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to establish his research group at the University of Oxford. Before taking up his current position at Dundee in 2001, he was research team leader and head of the European Macromolecular Structure Database at the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge.

Dr. Daniel Barker

Title: Phylogeny reconstruction
Profile: Daniel Barker is Research Councils UK Academic Fellow in Evolutionary and Functional Genomics at the School of Biology, University of St Andrews. His research is in bioinformatics, especially comparative genomics, protein interactions, functional annotation, adaptive significance of sequences and markers, and phylogeny. Previously he has worked at the University of Reading, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and in industry.

Prof. Ian Korf

Title: Hidden Markov Models; SNAP; Perl Programming
Profile: Ian Korf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of California Davis. His research and expertise lies at the intersection of molecular biology and bioinformatics. His interests include gene prediction, sequence alignment, motif finding, genome annotation, gene expression, genetic algorithms, and hidden Markov models.

Prof. Dannie Durand

Title: Phylogenomics; NOTUNG
Profile: Dannie Durand is an associate professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research is in computational genomics, with a focus on the evolution of new genes via gene duplication and domain shuffling. She holds a BS degree in physics from MIT and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Columbia University. Durand is the recipient of a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Science and Engineering fellowship.

Dr. David Ferrier

Title: Pulling (some) things together
Profile: David Ferrier is an RCUK Fellow in Marine Biology in the Scottish Oceans Institute, University of St Andrews. His research is focused on understanding animal evolution from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology and comparative genomics. In particular the focus is often on the developmental control genes of the homeobox family, and understanding the interplay between their organisation in the genome and their expression and function during development across different animal phyla.