I have been doing bioinformatics research since 1988, much of that time at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. Currently, I use data visualization and usability principles to advance biological and biomedical research, particularly the understanding of systems biology data.
At the moment, one of my main projects is Reflect, a service for annotating biochemical terms in web pages; it has won international recognition, and is currently used by life scientists to process 20,000 documents per day. Another main project is the VIZBI initiative, which aims to raise the global standard of visualization and usability in bioinformatics software. Other projects include the SRS 3D service - which integrates 3D structure, sequence, and sequence features - and the Martini service, which characterizes functional differences between sets of genes.
Before working on these projects, I held several managerial roles in industry, including Lion Bioscience, which was EMBL's first spin-off company and was a world leader in industrial bioinformatics.
Previous to that, I was mostly focused on improving how 3D structures of proteins are calculated from NMR data; this work is now highly cited, and our method has been used for most NMR structures determined to date.
Prior to working on NMR data, I was at University of Sydney, Australia, where I was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for research into the molecular basis of muscle movement using interdisciplinary approaches, including biophysics, biochemistry, and what is now called bioinformatics. Prior to that, I completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours - also at the University of Sydney - with majors in physics and pure mathematics, and with an honours thesis on plant biophysics.
