Short CV for Beijing China 20081014
From JongBhak.com
Jong Bhak is the director of KOBIC (Korean Bioinformation Center) since 2005, the representative national bioinformatics center, at KRIBB (Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology). He received his BSc. Honours in biochemistry from Aberdeen University in 1994 and his Ph.D. in BioInformatics from Cambridge University in 1997. His main research areas have beenprotein structure predictioin, sequence analysis, genome comparison, DNA chip analysis, interactomics, variomics, and programming module development such as Bioperl. He joined George Church lab in Harvard Medical School in 1998 as a postdoc. for DNA chip analyses. He worked with Liisa Holm from 1999 till 2001. His main research interests expanded to interactomics and network biology. In 2001, he joined MRC-DUNN as a group leader to research on ageing problems (geronto-genomics) and mitochondrial functions. In 2003, he became an associate professor at KAIST, Korea. He worked on a broad range of bioinformatics problem with interest in computer hardware, operating systems, programming, and applications. He is a proponent of borderless world and openfree information sharing. He advocates personal genome project and free geomics. He plans to establish a virtual Asia Pacific Bioinformation Center.
Meeting Abstract
Free Genomics and Bioinformatics
Genome sequencing technology is becoming very cheap. Real benefits of fast sequencing must be shared by the public. All the human beings will have their own genome sequences in the future. However, the bottleneck of utilizing genome information is in bioinformatics technologies. Genome analysis software and hardware are critical in the next biotechnology. Asia is a late starter in genomics. However, the impact Asia as a whole bring will the most powerful in the next decades. Korea has set a goal to be the 7th most advanced biotechnology nation by the year 2016. Genomics information and technology will be the major factors in achieving the goal. However, it is an unrealistic goal presently as there is no sufficient infrastructure for producing and analyzing very large scale genome and related ome information.
One approach of overcoming the present situation is to create an industry of freely sharing bioinformatics tools for genome analysis. This way, Korea can accelerate the speed of developing genomic applications in the society. This technical lubricant will enhance commercial activities and produce markets in medical and biotechnological fields.
KOBIC has been developing genome analysis tools in the past 7 years. We are interested in bioinformatics tools in all the omes and omics fields in the world. However, as the fields are too diverse and the data are too much to process for a small national center, we have been trying to automate bioinformatics tools that process databases. The results are bioengine, biopipelines, and bioportals. We are the first institutes which actively used Wiki based openfree information sharing strategy. We are building a long pipeline of genome, proteome, interactome, variome, and drug screening tools. We hope to share these tools with neighboringnations to accelerate the biotechnology in Asia. We have been proposing a virtual bioinformatics infrastructure that facilitates the sharing of data and software programs in Asia. It is called Asia Pacific Bioinformation Center.
Our basic philosophy is sharing the most fundamental information of a human being, i.e., genome information, to maximize the health and well-being of the public through medical research on diseases and ageing. Currently, KOBIC is involved with a large scale SNP analysis to map the genetic diversity of Korea and Asia. Our goal is to find SNPs and mutations that are important for diseases and drugs. We have a well established in silico drug screening pipeline for protein targets. We are interested in genomic diversity called variome by working with Human Variome Project (HVP) and other international organizations.
Sent to:
<strong>Mingjie Fan</strong>
International Cooperation Division
China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD)
Ministry of Science and Technology
B7, ZaoJunMiao, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, P.R.China
Tel: +86-10-6216-1963
Fax: +86-10-6211-4106
Mobile: +86-139-1175-9769
Email: fanmj@cncbd.org.cn
Website: www.cncbd.org.cn
