Robert Beiko,

Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University

Robert Beiko is a Canada Research Chair in bioinformatics – the computational analysis of biological data, in particular DNA sequence and related data. His PhD research at the University of Ottawa used machine-learning methods to identify DNA sequences that control the expression of genes. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Molecular Biosciences at the University of Queensland, and performed the first large-scale mapping of lateral gene transfer – the “sharing” of genes, including virulence factors and antimicrobial resistance genes, among microbes. Since taking up his faculty position in 2006 he has developed software for the analysis of microbial genomes and communities, developed tools for visualization and analysis of geographic and genetic data. His most recent work includes software for automated interpretation of DNA sequence data in a population-genetic context. He has also contributed to the bioinformatics community in Canada, serving on the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology National Strategy Committee, and organizing the first Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop in Metagenomic Data Analysis.