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Dr. Leroy Hood (opens in new tab), President, Institute for Systems Biology (ISB)
In 2000, Dr. Hood co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington to pioneer systems approaches to biology and medicine. Most recently, Dr. Hood’s lifelong contributions to biotechnology have earned him the prestigious 2004 Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers, received 14 patents, and has co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Hood has also played a role in founding numerous biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin and Rosetta.
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Dr. Jim Ostell, Chief of the Information Engineering Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health
Dr. Ostell was one of only twelve tenured NIH scientists to be appointed in 1996 to the Senior Biomedical Research Service. Under his direction, the NCBI Information Engineering Branch has produced a central computer infrastructure for biomedical information, covering the published literature, DNA and protein sequences, three-dimensional structures of biological molecules, assemblies of complete organism genomes, human genetics and phenotypes, and more. More that 2 million unique users a month use the NCBI on-line services and the NCBI user community has grown from a base of molecular biology researchers to include physicians, educators, and the general public. Some of the best-known resources provided by NCBI include GenBank, Entrez, PubMed, BLAST, dbEST, UniGene, dbSNP, LocusLink, RefSeq, Human Genome Resources, and many others.
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Dr. Alexander Szalay (opens in new tab), Alumni Centennial Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Alexander Szalay spent over ten years working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) — the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. When completed, it will provide detailed optical images covering more than a quarter of the sky, and a 3-dimensional map of about a million galaxies and quasars. As the survey progresses, the data are released to the scientific community and the general public in annual increments. His interests are theoretical astrophysics and galaxy formation. His research includes: Multicolor Properties of Galaxies, Galaxy Evolution, the Large Scale Power Spectrum of Fluctuations, Gravitational Lensing, and Pattern recognition and Classification Problems.
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Dr. Tony Hey (opens in new tab), Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing, Microsoft
Dr. Hey is one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field of parallel computing, most recently as director of the United Kingdom’s ambitious e-Science Initiative. He reports directly to Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief technical officer and senior vice president for Advanced Strategies and Policy, and works across the company to coordinate Microsoft’s efforts to collaborate with the scientific community worldwide. He is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Union’s Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. In addition, Hey has advised countries such as China, France, Ireland and Switzerland to help them advance their scientific agenda and become more competitive in the global technology economy.