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Mark McDowall: BBSRC Funded Ph.D. Student.

Mark did his undergraduate degree at the University of Durham in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.   Realising that he enjoyed computers more than pipettes and  gels, he went to the University of York to do an MRes in Bioinformatics.      After taking a year out working in the IT department at the City of York Council he jumped ship and ventured north to start a PhD on the prediction of protein-protein interactions.

 When he is not programming or reading papers he enjoys photography, walking,  cycling and badminton, plus when he gets the chance, jive and ballroom dancing.

Mark joined the group on 10th September 2007.

Chris Cole:  Senior Bioinformatics Research Officer.

From 1st Feb 2006.

Michelle Scott - Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded fellow.

After a bachelor degree in biochemistry at the Université de Montréal and a Masters in biochemistry and molecular biology under the supervision of Karl Riabowol at the University of
Calgary near the beautiful Canadian Rockies, Michelle decided that she missed math and physics.  As a consequence, she undertook a degree in computer engineering at McGill University in Montreal.  After two years, she switched to a PhD in bioinformatics/biochemistry at McGill under the co-supervision of Mike Hallett and David Thomas, studying protein subcellular localization. She moved to Dundee in the fall of 2005 to work as a CIHR post-doctoral fellow.  Michelle is interested in protein-protein interaction networks with a particular focus on the nucleolus.

Starting date: 1st December 2005

Cathy Stephenson SHEFC Funded SBRN Adminstrator.

From 15th October 2005

Christelle Robert - Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) student based at SCRI with primary supervision by Frank Wright and Leighton Pritchard at the SCRI but co-supervised by Geoff.

Ian Overton BBSRC Funded to work on the project "Structural Proteomics of Rational Targets" SPoRT as part of the Scottish Structural Proteomics Facility (SSPF)." Prior to joining Geoff's group he was in Manchester (then UMIST) doing doctoral research with Simon Hubbard, which focused on the Chicken Proteome, Transcriptome & Genome. Before his
Ph.D., he worked as a Bioinformatics Officer with Provalis plc. and spent over
six months travelling South East Asia and Australasia, largely on his own. He read Biochemistry at Oxford University, obtaining an undergraduate Masters degree. He has also worked with Astra-Zeneca at the bench.   He is interested in the relationships between protein structure/sequence and function, molecular dissection of biochemical mechanisms, and the development of rational therapeutic strategies.  Email: ian@compbio.dundee.ac.uk"

Starting Date: 1st December 2004.

Jim Procter - BBSRC Funded   postdoctoral RA to work on the Visualisation and Analysis of Biological Sequences Alignments and structures project.

Jim came across the water from the University of Hamburg's ZBH to implement bioinformatics analysis web services for Jalview, as part of the BBSRC funded VAMSAS project. After spending a number of years working on protein structure comparison and structure prediction, his dream is never to have to write a script again - but concedes that he might be being a little bit too hopeful there...

Starting Date: 1st November 2004.

 Jonathan Manning - Jon started in the group in October 2004 after a Master of Research in Bioinformatics at the University of Leeds. This followed a Bachelors degree in Biochemistry (also at Leeds), which included an industrial year in sunny Florida studying the genetics of Parkinsonism, and a computer-based dissertation project examining the role of water in protein-protein interfaces. He rapidly discovered that in contrast to lab work, with computers, any problems could for the most part reliably be traced to himself, rather than dodgy enzymes or broken pipettes.  Jon decided the laboratory was an environment best left to those with more patience, and his lab coat has been consigned to the bottom drawer ever since.

When not looking goofy in photographs, Jon likes to spend time attempting to deprogram his namby-pamby southern ways by walking up and down steep bits of the Scottish landscape at weekends with the university rucksack club. He invariably regrets the decision to do so come Sunday evening, but somehow forgets it when, after a few beers, the signup sheet is proffered. Other interests include beer, wine, cooking, swimming, cycling, and too much TV.

While not entirely sure what his 'life after PhD' will be, Jon's grateful to Geoff and the BBSRC for allowing him to do interesting biological research in combination with messing around on the computer. 

 Tom Walsh - did his first degree in Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin and then moved to University College Dublin for a PhD on modelling cytokine receptor complexes. He moved to Dundee in 2002 to work on the EC funded project TEMBLOR.

TEMBLOR is funded by European Community Contract No. QLRI-CT-2001-00015 for "TEMBLOR"  under the specific RTD programme "Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources" Tom maintains the group's MSD installation and his other interests include writing a Perl library for interfacing with the SCOP database hierarchy running STAMP searches in parallel on the group's computing cluster and building a database of pairwise structure comparisons of SCOP domains.

From 1st July 2005 Tom has transferred to a SHEFC funded position as part of the Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network (SBRN).

Tom claims to be able to program in Fortran and play the accordion but the group has so far been spared these dubious accomplishments. In his spare time he enjoys collecting useless trivia.

David Martin   - Is the Post Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre Bioinformatics Scientific Officer. David graduated with a degree in Chemistry from Kings College London in 1991. He completed a PhD in protein structure/function at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith in Ted Tuddenham's group before taking up an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship in Oslo. An EU TMR fellowship as part of the GeneQuiz project allowed David to develop his bioinformatics skills and he took the position as Head of the Norwegian EMBNet node at the University of Oslo in August 1999. Following his move to Dundee in March 2001 David has a broad responsibility to develop bioinformatics support, training and services for the emerging data intensive science that is going on in the School of Life Sciences. David's scientific interests include genome annotation and data management. He has developed the GOtcha Tool which annotates sequences with GO term. He also  collects genomes to annotate, preferably ones from nasty organisms such as Malaria and Sleeping Sickness. His interest is in improving the annotations, working out how to tell the annotations have improved (not as easy as you might think) and looking at these anntoations in a systems biology context. He also runs the TACTICS project in collaboration with colleagues from the Medical faculty, a data management system that is attempting to bring order to the plethora of research data arising from the Dundee Tissue Bank.
His external interests seem to involve rebuilding cars, houses and boats when he isn't out in the mountains or enjoying family life.  He also plays the clarinet and saxophone but not as well as you'd want to be listening to.

Geoff Barton did his first degree in Biochemistry at the University of Manchester. He then did a Ph.D. supervised by Mike Sternberg in the Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London before spending two years as an ICRF Fellow working with Chris Rawlings at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Labs. in London. In 1989 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to work in the Lab of Molecular Biophysics, University of Oxford. From April 1995 until October 1997, Geoff was also Head of Genome Informatics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics .  

From 1st October 1997-July 2001 Geoff was a Research and Development Team Leader at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute.  

From 1st January 1998-July 2001 Geoff was also head of the European Macromolecular Structure Database at EBI.  

From 30th March 2001 Geoff has been Professor of Bioinformatics at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.  Geoff moved to Dundee full-time in July 2001 and is now co-director (with Mike Ferguson) of the Post Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre.

Geoff spends his leisure time working with the Men in Black,
and more recently -  The Three Musketeers. Since July 2005
he has also discovered tennis...