Christophe Dessimoz | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Christophe Dessimoz speaking at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) / European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Basel, 2019 | |
| Born | Christophe Dessimoz 1980 (age 43–44) |
| Alma mater | ETH Zurich (MSc, PhD) |
| Known for | Orthologous MAtrix (OMA)[4] |
| Awards | Overton Prize (2019)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Bioinformatics Genomics Phylogenetics Evolution Computational Biology[2] |
| Institutions | University of Lausanne European Bioinformatics Institute University College London Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics |
| Thesis | Comparative Genomics Using Pairwise Evolutionary Distances (2009) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gaston Gonnet[3] |
| Website | lab |
Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.[5][2][6][7][8] He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology.[1] Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Dessimoz obtained his Master of Science degree in 2003[5] and PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from ETH Zurich in Switzerland[9] where his doctoral research was supervised by Gaston Gonnet[3] and examined by Amos Bairoch.[9]
After postdoctoral research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire,[10] he joined University College London (UCL) as lecturer in 2013, and was promoted to Reader in 2015.[5] In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as professor, retaining an appointment at UCL.[11] Since 2016, Dessimoz has served as group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics[5] where his research interests are in bioinformatics, genomics, phylogenetics, evolution and computational biology.[2][12][13][14][15]
Dessimoz is known for his management of the Orthologous MAtrix (OMA)[4] which provides information on orthologous proteins. OMA has important applications in protein function prediction.[1] Dessimoz's approach to benchmarking had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference, sequence alignment, and the gene ontology (GO).[1][16][17]
Dessimoz was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to computational biology.[1]
