Joseph (Joe) Ward: Joe has joined us as a postdoc bioinformatician working primarily with the new NGS sequencing facility in Dundee.  Having grown up in Hampshire, he's been slowly working his way up the country. After doing a bachelors degree in biochemistry at the University of  Nottingham, Joe decided to "unleash his inner nerd" (and get as far away from lab equipment as possible) and went on to do a masters degree and a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Leeds.

Joe joined the group on 1st March 2013

Thiago Britto Borges: Thiago joined the group as a Ph.D. student on the CAPES scheme from Brazil.  Thiago did his bachelor's (2010) and M.Sc. (2012) in Biophysics at the Biophysical Institute Carlos Chagas Filho.  His Ph.D. is funded by the College of Life Sciences and the Brazilian Agency CAPES.  His initial project is to study protein O-GlcNAcylation and then build an efficient and accurate substrate predictor for this reaction which will combine data from Daan Van Aalten  with the expertise in the Barton Group on Neural Network classifiers. 

Thiago joined the group on 5th November 2012

Nancy Giang:  Nancy joined the group as a Ph.D. student on the Wellcome Trust 4-year programme after carrying out a short rotation project in the group.

Nancy joined the group on 1st September 2012

Konstantinos (Kostas) Moutselos:  After a bachelor's degree in Physics and a Masters in Signal Processing & Computational Systems at the National University of Athens, Konstantinos was appointed as a high-school teacher in public education. Then, for over a decade he was seconded to the Managing Authority  "Education and Life Long Learning" of the Hellenic Ministry of Education, developing business software, supporting users, and as project manager for Programmes co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.  The budget of his supervised programmes amounted to 40m Euro, and the Management Information System he developed was acknowledged by the Hellenic Special Secretary of European Funds as a best practice for other Operational Programmes. Nevertheless, as the "Life Long Learning"€� motto dictated, he ventured a PhD in Bioinformatics at the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics of the University of Central Greece. Konstantinos has joined the group as a post -doc/programmer to work on software development for proteomics.  He sits primarily in the Data Analysis Group.

Konstantinos joined the group on 6th August 2012.

Alexander (Sasha) Sherstnev:  Alexander (Sasha) Sherstnev: Sasha studied for an MSci in nuclear physics at the Moscow State University in Russia and made his Ph.D. thesis in theoretical particle physics at the same university. As a postgraduate student Sasha was a long-time visitor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) from MSU and did research on properties of the Higgs boson and the top quark for the CMS collaboration. Sasha has had postdoc positions at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Oxford. His main scientific projects over the last 8 years before transition to bioinformatics were Monte-Carlo generators of events of elementary particle collisions, large programs used by particle physicists in search for new elementary particles on huge particle accelerators such as the LHC at CERN. Apart from an interest in scientific programming Sasha has always had a strong interest in data analysis techniques, especially in neural networks and other "soft computing" methods. 

Sasha has joined us to work on the the study of alternative polyadenylation in Arabidopsis by deep sequencing techniques.  This is a BBSRC funded project joint with Dr Gordon Simpson from the Division of Plant Sciences.  From March 2013, Sasha moved onto a new BBSRC funded project to improve and support our web tools: Jpred, Kinomer, Jabaws and TarO. 

Google Scholar Citations.

Sasha joined the group on 15th May 2010.

Nick Schurch: Nick, like Marek (below), has also made the transition from astronomy to biology.  Nick studied for an MSci in physics at the University of Bristol, before completing his astrophysics Ph.D. at the University of Leicester.  Nick has had postdoc positions on three continents (Europe, USA and Asia) culminating with a UK-China Fellowship for Excellence with the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, China, before joining the Barton Group in 2009.  Nick has always had a strong interest in biology (despite studying physics) and over the
past few years has enjoyed working in a field with more immediate relevance to the world! Nick enjoys watching films, falconry, and all things football (he is a lifelong Liverpool fan despite not coming from Liverpool!).

Nick is an Associate Member of the  Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  He was supported by funding from the Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance (SULSA)  as part of our venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

Google Scholar Citations

Nick joined the DAG on 1st May 2009 but on 1st July 2012  moved onto a joint BBSRC grant between Geoff Barton and Gordon Simpson to work on non-coding RNA in Arabidopsis.

Marek Gierlinski: Marek is a member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  He is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression as part of our joint venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

Marek was born and educated in Poland. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and completed his PhD in astrophysics at N. Copernicus Centre in Warsaw. He moved to Durham in 2000 as a postdoc and stayed there until 2009 in a succession of research and teaching positions. His main interest there was weird astrophysical objects: black holes and neutron stars. 2009 marked a dramatic change in his career: switching to Bioinformatics. One huge step for a man…

Google Scholar Citations.

Marek joined the DAG on 23rd March 2009

Pieta Schofield: Pieta is a member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  Pieta is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression as part of our joint venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

After working as a programmer and systems analyst for various finance sector companies, Pieta spent five years working as systems manager for the Parke-Davis Neuroscience Research Centre in Cambridge. She then returned to academia completing a PhD in mathematical biology at the University of Dundee in 2002. Since then she completed a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship in Mathematical Biology, switching theoretical insects for the real thing.  Pieta joined the Data Analysis Group in January 2009 from the SCRI where she developed methods for thermographic detection of plant stress.

Pieta joined the DAG on 1st January 2009

Chris Cole:  Senior Bioinformatics Research Officer and founder member of the Data Analysis Group.

As another ex-Simon Hubbard (Manchester) group member (like Ian Overton) Chris found the attraction of Dundee too great to miss.  He dragged his family along with him, although, his wife was happy to be back in Scotland!

Chris left the bench after a traumatising Ph.D. and has been 'doing' Bioinformatics ever since. In that time he has worked on protein-protein interface prediction, homology modelling, Prion protein structure analysis and various aspects of proteomics. Now in Dundee Chris works on a variety of projects, but mainly in the realm of protein structure. Under his remit in the Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network, Chris is always happy to discuss interesting problems which may have a Bioinformatics angle.
 

Google Scholar Citations.

Chris joined the Barton Group on 1st Feb 2006 and then became the founding member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG).  From March 2011 he switched to work primarily on a joint Wellcome Trust Funded  project with Irwin McLean, but remains an associate of the DAG.

Jim Procter - From 1st October 2009, Jim became the "Jalview Coordinator" funded by BBSRC for 5 years to oversee new developments in the Jalview multiple alignment analysis workbench.  Jim also continues to be involved in the EU ENFIN project with work on various aspects of systems biology software development applied to biological data.

Before ENFIN, Jim was a BBSRC Funded   postdoctoral RA  working on the Visualisation and Analysis of Biological Sequences Alignments and structures project.  In particular the development of Jalview and the VAMSAS exchange API.

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...

Google Scholar Citations.

Starting Date:  1st November 2004.

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.

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.

Google Scholar Citations.

David Moved to Dundee in 2001.

Geoff Barton did his first degree in Biochemistry at the University of Manchester. He then performed Ph.D. research 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 set up his own group 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 which is  now known as the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe).

From 30th March 2001 Geoff has been Professor of Bioinformatics at the College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.  Geoff moved to Dundee full-time in July 2001 and recently founded the Data Analysis Group in collaboration with the GRE Centre. He is a Fellow of the Society of Biology and Honorary Fellow of the James Hutton Institute.

Google Scholar Citations.

Geoff used to spend his leisure time working with the Men in Black, he then teamed up with the The Three Musketeers  but  in Oct 2009  joined The Swimmers.  In July 2005 he also discovered tennis.  After finding like-minded musical colleagues,  he revived his love of flute playing, and on 8th May 2010 had the first  musical review of his playing published in The Courier.