Biography:Christos Ouzounis

From HandWiki
Christos Ouzounis
Born
Christos A. Ouzounis

Greece
Alma materAristotle University of Thessaloniki (BSc)
University of York (MSc, PhD)
Scientific career
FieldsComputational Biology
Systems Biomedicine
Bioinformatics
Evolution[1]
InstitutionsEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory
SRI International
European Bioinformatics Institute[2]
King's College London
Centre for Research & Technology Hellas[3]
ThesisThe role of sequence conservation in the prediction of protein structure. (1993)
Doctoral advisorChris Sander
Websitebcplab.wordpress.com/who/director

Christos A. Ouzounis is a computational biologist and a director of research at the CERTH in Thessaloniki.[4][5][1][6]

Education

Ouzounis received his undergraduate degree (B.Sc.) in Biological Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1987[4]. He then received an M.Sc. in Biological Computation from the University of York in 1988[4] and went on to perform doctoral work with Chris Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany receiving his PhD from the University of York in 1993[4][7].

Career and research

After his PhD, Ouzounis was a Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) Postdoctoral fellow at SRI International, Menlo Park, California. Ouzounis started his own laboratory, researching computational genomics, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 1996.

Ouzounis moved his laboratory in 2007 to King's College London (KCL), as a Professor, Chair and Director of the KCL Centre for Bioinformatics. Following the restructuring at King's in 2009/2010, he decided to return to Greece, joining CPERI at CERTH in Thessaloniki. His research interests include genome structure, function and evolution, evolution of protein function, evolution of genetic information-processing systems, theory and applications of biological sequence comparison, data and knowledge representation for genomics, unsupervised machine learning in very large datasets, biologically-inspired hardware & software engineering (unpublished works), synthetic biology, exobiology, and science communication.

Some of his best known contributions in the field of computational genomics include automated sequence annotation[8], the discovery of genomic context methods[9][10][11], the inference of metabolic pathways from genome sequences[12][13], the development of methods for large-scale clustering of sequence similarities[14][15], the definition of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)[16][17], and the quantification of horizontal gene transfer patterns across the "net of life"[18]. He also maintains a strong interest in the development of computational biology as an exemplary paradigm in the history of contemporary science[19].

His former PhD students include David Kreil (2001),[citation needed] Anton Enright (2002)[citation needed] JM Peregrin-Alvarez (2003),[citation needed] Victor Kunin (2004)[citation needed] Nikos Darzentas (2005)[citation needed] and Ignat Drozdov (2010).[citation needed]

Awards and honours

Ouzounis is associate editor for the journal PLOS Computational Biology (since 2007). He is also an associate editor for the journal BioSystems and Honorary Editor for the journal Bioinformatics. He is a founding officer of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the Mikrobiokosmos initiative (Greece), the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics and Hellenic Bioinformatics.[4] Ouzounis was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto (2011-2014).

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  2. "From trees of life to scale-free networks: a new vision for bacterial evolution". CORDIS, European Union. https://cordis.europa.eu/article/rcn/24111/en. 
  3. "Christos A. Ouzounis Biography". Archived on 2019-08-29. Error: If you specify |archivedate=, you must also specify |archiveurl=. https://bibe2012.cs.ucy.ac.cy/Christos_A_Ouzounis.html. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 "Lifeboat foundation Advisory Board". https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.christos.a.ouzounis. 
  5. "Christos Ouzounis's Bibliography". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/christos.ouzounis.1/bibliography/40131583/public/?sort=date&direction=descending. 
  6. Christos Ouzounis publications from Europe PubMed Central
  7. Ouzounis, Christos (1993). The role of sequence conservation in the prediction of protein structure (PhD thesis). University of York. OCLC 53486615. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.387193.
  8. Casari, G.; Andrade, M. A.; Bork, P.; Boyle, J.; Daruvar, A.; Ouzounis, C.; Schneider, R.; Tamames, J. et al. (1995-08-24). "Challenging times for bioinformatics". Nature 376 (6542): 647–648. doi:10.1038/376647a0. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 7651513. Bibcode1995Natur.376..647C. 
  9. Ouzounis, C.; Kyrpides, N. (1996). "The emergence of major cellular processes in evolution". FEBS Letters 390 (2): 119–123. doi:10.1016/0014-5793(96)00631-x. ISSN 0014-5793. PMID 8706840. 
  10. Tamames, J.; Casari, G.; Ouzounis, C.; Valencia, A. (1997). "Conserved clusters of functionally related genes in two bacterial genomes". Journal of Molecular Evolution 44 (1): 66–73. doi:10.1007/pl00006122. ISSN 0022-2844. PMID 9010137. Bibcode1997JMolE..44...66T. 
  11. Enright, A. J.; Iliopoulos, I.; Kyrpides, N. C.; Ouzounis, C. A. (1999). "Protein interaction maps for complete genomes based on gene fusion events". Nature 402 (11): 87–90. doi:10.1038/47056. PMID 10573422. Bibcode1999Natur.402...86E. 
  12. Karp, P. D.; Ouzounis, C.; Paley, S. (1996). "HinCyc: a knowledge base of the complete genome and metabolic pathways of H. influenzae". Proceedings. International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology 4: 116–124. ISSN 1553-0833. PMID 8877511. 
  13. Karp, Peter D.; Ouzounis, Christos A.; Moore-Kochlacs, Caroline; Goldovsky, Leon; Kaipa, Pallavi; Ahrén, Dag; Tsoka, Sophia; Darzentas, Nikos et al. (2005). "Expansion of the BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases to 160 genomes". Nucleic Acids Research 33 (19): 6083–6089. doi:10.1093/nar/gki892. ISSN 1362-4962. PMID 16246909. 
  14. Enright, A. J.; van Dongen, S.; Ouzounis, C. A. (2002). "An efficient algorithm for large-scale detection of protein families". Nucleic Acids Research 30 (7): 1575–1584. doi:10.1093/nar/30.7.1575. PMID 11917018. 
  15. Kunin, Victor; Ahren, Dag; Goldovsky, Leon; Janssen, Paul; Ouzounis, Christos A. (2005). "Measuring genome conservation across taxa: divided strains and united kingdoms". Nucleic Acids Research 33 (2): 616–621. doi:10.1093/nar/gki181. ISSN 1362-4962. PMID 15681613. 
  16. Kyrpides, N.; Overbeek, R.; Ouzounis, C. (1999). "Universal protein families and the functional content of the last universal common ancestor". Journal of Molecular Evolution 49 (4): 413–423. doi:10.1007/pl00006564. ISSN 0022-2844. PMID 10485999. Bibcode1999JMolE..49..413K. 
  17. Ouzounis, Christos A.; Kunin, Victor; Darzentas, Nikos; Goldovsky, Leon (2006). "A minimal estimate for the gene content of the last universal common ancestor--exobiology from a terrestrial perspective". Research in Microbiology 157 (1): 57–68. doi:10.1016/j.resmic.2005.06.015. ISSN 0923-2508. PMID 16431085. 
  18. Kunin, Victor; Goldovsky, Leon; Darzentas, Nikos; Ouzounis, Christos A. (2005). "The net of life: reconstructing the microbial phylogenetic network". Genome Research 15 (7): 954–959. doi:10.1101/gr.3666505. ISSN 1088-9051. PMID 15965028. 
  19. Ouzounis, Christos A. (2012). "Rise and demise of bioinformatics? Promise and progress". PLoS Computational Biology 8 (4): e1002487. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002487. ISSN 1553-7358. PMID 22570600. Bibcode2012PLSCB...8E2487O.