Apple Bioinformatics Award Winners
Meet five people whose breakthroughs make the progress of science real. Chosen from hundreds of applicants to the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics Award Program, they are shaping our health and our world through their research in biotechnology — and the help of Apple’s Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics.
In one of the great theoretical discoveries of the 20th century, James Watson and Francis Crick deciphered the self-replicating structure of DNA. Building on their work in the 21st century, these scientists are taking biotechnology into new regions and the promise of everything from customized drugs and genetic medicine to better environmental safeguards.
Dr. Deborah Dean, scientist and professor of medicine at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, is searching for a vaccine for bacteria in the genus Chlamydia — the leading causes of preventable blindness and sexually-transmitted diseases in the world today.
Dr. Edward DeLong, professor with joint appointments in two departments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses genomic techniques to learn about the ocean’s microbial communities — with a goal of understanding how microbes balance the ocean’s chemical and biological cycles.
Dr. Christopher Lee, associate professor at UCLA’s Institute for Genomics and Proteomics, explores three fields that are transforming medical research: alternative splicing, comparative genomics, and partial order alignment. All three are crucial for making sense of the human genome.
Dr. Simon Lin, assistant research professor in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University, mines the non-coding region of the human genome. His goal: To translate bioinformatics computing into early cancer detection and treatment.
Dr. Michael Newton serves as a professor with dual appointments in the departments of Statistics and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His team’s work — decomposing and analyzing variations in genomic data — promises to improve the discovery of biological signals.
