Mark Musen

Mark Musen, MD, PhD

Dr. Musen is Professor of Medicine (Medical Informatics) and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where he is head of the Stanford Medical Informatics laboratory. He holds an MD from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford. Dr. Musen conducts research related to intelligent systems, the Semantic Web, reusable ontologies and knowledge representations, and biomedical decision support. His long-standing work on a system known as Protégé has led to an open-source technology now used by thousands of developers around the world to build intelligent computer systems and new computer applications for biomedicine, e-commerce and the Semantic Web. He is known for his research of the application of intelligent computer systems to assist health-care workers in guideline-directed therapy and in management of clinical trials. Dr. Musen’s group has begun to explore the use of knowledge-based technologies to monitor a variety of data sources in an effort to detect incipient epidemics, including those caused by possible acts of bioterrorism.

In 1989 Dr. Musen received the Young Investigator Award for Research in Medical Knowledge Systems from the American Association of Medical Systems and Informatics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1992. He has served on the Biomedical Library Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine and as an advisor to many academic and industrial groups concerned with the development of advanced information technology. Dr. Musen sits on the editorial boards of several journals related to medical informatics and computer science. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Ontology.

05/04

Larry Hunter

Dr. Lawrence Hunter is the Director of the Computational Bioscience Program and of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and an Associate Professor in the departments of Pharmacology, Computer Science, and Preventive Medicine and Biometrics. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1989, and then spent more than 10 years at the National Institutes of Health, ending as the Chief of the Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics Section at the National Cancer Institute. He inaugurated two of the most important academic bioinformatics conferences, ISMB and PSB, and was the founding President of the International Society for Computational Biology. Dr. Hunter's research interests span a wide range of areas, from cognitive science to rational drug design. His primary focus recently has been the integration of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning techniques and their application to interpreting data generated by high throughput molecular biology.

Judith Blake

Dr. Judith Blake's research over the last 10 years has focused on the development of bioinformatics systems essential for functional genomics and genetics research particularly in mammalian systems. Specifically, the activities of her research group and collaborations center on database design for complex biological data, bio-ontology development and use, and comparative genomics. She has been a leader in efforts to bring semantic standards and data integration methodologies for genomic, genetic and phenotypic information to the biological research community. Judith is one of the principal investigators of the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium; an international project that develops and provides ontologies for molecular biology and that supports functional annotation and analysis efforts using the GO. She is also one of the principal investigators in the Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) consortium. The MGI database integrates genetic, genomic and phenotypic information about the laboratory mouse and provides this to the scientific community. Judith received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981 and has held scientific appointments at the Smithsonian Institution and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). In 1996, Judith joined The Jackson Laboratory, a premier biomedical research institute that focuses on using the laboratory mouse as a model of human biology and disease. She is an Associate Staff Scientist in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology group.

Eric Neumann

Eric Neumann is global head of the Knowledge Management for Scientific and Medical Affairs within Sanofi-Aventis, covering all of their R&D needs. Dr. Neumann is an expert in knowledge-based methods of working in the pharmaceutical industry, which has been his interest for the past 15 years.

Prior to joining Aventis, Dr. Neumann was at Beyond Genomics, a biopharmaceutical company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, which was founded to discover and develop new drugs by exploiting unique technologies and the knowledge generated from the "Omics" revolution. At Beyond Genomics, Dr. Neumann held the position of VP of Bioinfomatics and Knowledge Research. He is also the co-founder and Scientific Advisor for Genstruct, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that applies a unique Knowledge Assembly and Molecular Epistemics approach to reveal disease mechanisms, optimal validation strategies, mechanisms of action and pre-clinical development strategies.

Prior to Beyond Genomics, Eric Neumann was VP of Life Science and Informatics at 3rd Millennium, a developer of custom software systems for biotech and pharmaceutical R&D, which is also located in Waltham, Massachusetts. He has also held positions at NetGenics (now LION), a company that built integrated informatics solutions, and Bolt, Beranek & Newman an R&D company that provides both advanced research and custom, research-based solutions for customers in the private and public sector. Dr. Neumann completed his bachelor's degree in Life Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1989, he received his Ph.D. in pharmacology, neurobiology and developmental genetics from Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Neumann is driven by the belief that there is an enormous opportunity to improve drug discovery processes by encouraging the proper exchange of information and knowledge.