Biographical sketches of authors

Jeff T. Inman   National Center for Genome Resources, 2935 Rodeo Park Drive East, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 (electronic mail: jti@ncgr.org). Mr. Inman is a software developer at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he pursues an interest in distributed systems. He received a B.S. degree in computer science from Boston University in 1986. He worked at Symbolics, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he did research on fine-grained parallelism with the Message-Passing Semantics group. Prior to his work at NCGR, Mr. Inman spent time at the Santa Fe Institute, developing software that was used to study the inverse protein folding problem using genetic algorithms.

H. Raul Flores   Netvoice Technologies Corporation, 3201 West Royal Lane, Suite 160, Irving, Texas 75063 (electronic mail: rflores@netvoice.org). Mr. Flores is currently working for Netvoice Technologies as a manager in the Web Development group where he is developing e-commerce applications using Java servlets, PHP, and SQL. Mr. Flores graduated from Texas A&M University with an undergraduate degree in geology. He received a master's degree in software engineering from Texas Christian University in 1993.

Gregory D. May   Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, 2510 Sam Noble Parkway, Ardmore, Oklahoma 73402 (electronic mail: gdmay@noble.org). Dr. May is an associate scientist in the Plant Biology Division at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. His training is in plant physiology, molecular biology, and mechanisms of tissue-specific gene expression. Dr. May graduated with a B.S. degree in biology from Southeast Missouri State University and received his Ph.D. degree in plant physiology from the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M University. He did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology (IBT), Houston, Texas, where he studied plant tissue-specific gene expression. Following his postdoctoral studies, Dr. May was granted a Research Assistant Professor position at the IBT. In 1995, Dr. May joined the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University as an assistant scientist. In 1997, he was granted adjunct assistant professor status in the Section of Plant Biology at Cornell University. Dr. May joined the Noble Foundation in May 1999 to establish the Medicago genomics program. His current research interests focus on DNA repair and gene targeting mechanisms in plants.

Jennifer W. Weller   Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. 1750 Kraft Drive, Suite 1400, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia 24136 (electronic mail: jwweller@vt.edu). Dr. Weller is a research assistant professor at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech and was formerly NCGR's program leader for gene expression. She earned a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of Montana, Missoula. Her current research includes development of an EST and genomic DNA analysis pipeline and a “wet lab” investigation of the genes expressed by Arabidopsis thaliana in root development and during parasitic attack.

Callum J. Bell   National Center for Genome Resources, 2935 Rodeo Park Drive East, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 (electronic mail: cjb@ncgr.org). Dr. Bell is a senior research scientist at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His training is in genetics, molecular biology, and genomics, with a long-standing interest in bioinformatics solutions to problems in genomics. Dr. Bell graduated with a B.S. degree in biological sciences from Edinburgh University and obtained his Ph.D. degree in the genetics of gravity responses in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, from the same institution in 1988. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania biology department. In his postdoctoral studies he worked in a group generating a physical map of Arabidopsis, and he pioneered the use of microsatellites as genetic markers in that organism. His work in genomics continued with an appointment at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where he led the physical mapping of human chromosome 22, and at Sequana Therapeutics, where he managed a multidisciplinary project team attempting to identify human susceptibility genes for Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Dr. Bell joined NCGR in September 1999. His main interest is bioinformatics systems that enable knowledge discovery in biological sequence databases.