Maria Anisimova

Maria Anisimova is a senior research fellow at the Computational Biochemistry Research group headed by Prof Gaston Gonnet and a lecturer at the Institute of Computational Science of the Federal Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich; http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/anmaria/). Maria has an undergraduate degree in pure Mathematics from the Pedagogical State University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. After teaching Geometry and Mathematics for Finance and Business in London, she obtained an MRes in modeling biological complexity (CoMPLEX) and a PhD in statistical genomics under the supervision of Prof Ziheng Yang (Biology department) at University College London. During her PhD Maria worked on methods for detecting adaptive evolution on the protein-coding genes. Postdoctoral work included large-scale data analyses of viral and bacterial genomes with Prof Yang and statistical tests for clade supports with Prof Olivier Gascuel (LIRMM) at Université Montpellier II, France. Maria’s current research interests involve stochastic modeling of molecular evolution, statistical testing in phylogenetics and the application of machine learning techniques to large complex biological data

Olivier Gascuel

Olivier Gascuel first studied mathematics although his PhD was in computer science, and he started working in bioinformatics in the 80’s, at the very beginning of the genomic era and of the rapid development of interactions between mathematicians, computer scientists and molecular biologists. His first interests were in sequence analysis and protein structure prediction, using machine learning approaches. Since the mid-90’s, Olivier Gascuel has concentrated on evolution and phylogenetics, with particular focus on the mathematical and computational tools and concepts. He has  developed new evolutionary models, statistical tests, and tree inference algorithms (e.g. BioNJ and PhyML). He now leads a research group at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montpellier (France). He is an associate editor of Systematic Biology (leading journal in the field of Evolution) and belongs to the editorial board of BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Algorithms for Molecular Biology, and Evolutionary Bioinformatics. He has published 110 papers and book chapters, and authored several widely used computer programs in phylogenetics and bioinformatics. He has recently started a new adventure fighting pathogens, especially in Africa and endemic countries, using functional genomics and evolutionary approaches.

Gaston Gonnet

Professor Gonnet started his academic carreer in the analysis of algorithms. Later, in 1980, together with Keith Geddes, he formed the Symbolic Computation Group, a group devoted to research in Symbolic Computation or Computer Algebra, and to the development of the Maple Algebra System. Maple has found its way into the practical world, aiding engineers to do their computations, assisting scientists in their research and helping students to learn mathematics.
In 1983-84, the University of Waterloo and Oxford University Press became partners for the computerization of the Oxford English Dictionary. At that time, Professor Gonnet and colleagues founded the ``Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary''. The Centre has attracted a lot of activity around the work on the dictionary and also in connection with the research being done with large text databases. Some of these activities reached their climax with the publication of the second edition of the dictionary, a work which would have not been possible without intelligent text processing. The main contributions of this project have been in the areas of fast text searching, text structuring and text transformations which then were reused in bioinformatics.
In 1989, Professor Gonnet was awarded the Information Technology Association of Canada annual award for his contributions to computer algebra and text searching.
In 1989, Professor Gonnet accepted a position with E.T.H. Zurich, where he is working in Bioinformatics. Professor Gonnet and Prof Steven Benner founded the ETH Computational Biochemistry Research Group. The CBRG was responsible for the first self-matching of an entire protein database. The CBRG specializes in sequence analysis, models of evolution and phylogeny construction. The work in bioinformatics has been extended to various aspects including the creation and curation of the OMA database, the largest database of orthologous relations. The CBRG is a member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

Michel Tibayrenc.

Michel Tibayrenc (03/06/47), MD, PhD, Nationality: French.
Present professional address: Genetics and Infection of Infectious Diseases laboratory (GEMI), IRD Center, BP 64501, 34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.

Website : http://gemi.mpl.ird.fr Directeur de recherche Classe Exceptionnelle IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement).

Positions:
1974-1977: medical doctor in Algiers (Algeria) and in Paris (France).
Since 1977: a permanent position researcher at the IRD.
1 year in French Guiana
5 years in Bolivia
4 years in the USA (University of California and Centers for Disease Control Atlanta).
1986-2005: Founder and head of the Laboratory of Genetics and evolution of infectious diseases (IRD centre in Montpellier, France).
2005-2008: IRD representative in Thailand. Founder and principal organizer of the MEEGID (Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases) congresses.

Founder and editor-in-chief of Infection, Genetics and Evolution (Elsevier, Scientific production: 176 refereed papers)