Bioinformatics For Dummies

Jean-Michel Claverie is Professor of Medical Bioinformaticsat the School of Medicine of the Université de laMéditerranée, and a consultant in genomics andbioinformatics. He is the founder and current head of theStructural & Genomic Information Laboratory, located inMarseilles, a sunny city on the Mediterranean coast of France.Using science as a pretext to travel, Jean-Michel has heldpositions in Paris (France), Sherbrooke (PQ, Canada), the SalkInstitute (La Jolla, CA), the Pasteur Institute (Paris), Incytepharmaceutical (Palo Alto, CA); and the National Center forBiotechnology Information (Bethesda, MD). He has used computers inbiology since the early days -- his Ph.D. work involvedmodeling biochemical reactions by programming an 8K Honeywell 516computer right from the console switches! Although he has no clearrecollection of it, he has been credited with introducing theFrench word "bioinformatique" in the late eighties,before involuntarily coining the catchy"bioinformatics" by mistranslating it while giving atalk in English!
Jean-Michel's current research interests are in microbial andstructural genomics, and in the development of bioinformaticmethods for the prediction of gene function. He is the author orcoauthor of more than 150 scientific publications, and a member ofnumerous international review panels and scientific councils. Inhis spare time, he enjoys the relaxed pace of life in Marseilles,with his wife Chantal and their two sons, Nicholas and Raphael.
Cedric Notredame is a researcher at the French NationalCentre for Scientific Research. Cedric has used and abused thefacilities offered by science to wander around Europe. After aPh.D. at EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) and at the EuropeanBioinformatics Institute (Cambridge, UK) under the supervision ofDes Higgins (yes, the ClustalW guy), Cedric did a post-doc at theNational Institute of Medical Research (London, UK), in the lab ofWillie Taylor and under the supervision of Jaap Heringa. He thendid a post-doc in Lausanne (Switzerland) with Phillip Bucher, andremained involved with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics forseveral years. Having had his share of rain, snow, and wind, Cedrichas finally settled in Marseilles, where the sun and the sea aresimply warmer than any other place he has lived in.
Cedric dedicates most of his research to the multiple sequencealignment problem and its many applications in biology. His friendsclaim that his entire life (past, present, future) is somehowstuffed into the T-Coffee multiple-sequence alignment package. Whenhe is not busy dismantling T-Coffee and brewing new sequences,Cedric enjoys life in the company of his wife, Marita.