Bob Cottingham

BioEnergy Science Center: The Future of Computational Biology

Group Leader, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Bob is one of the pioneers of bioinformatics. In the 1970s he began his career as a software developer on some of the first genetic linkage analysis programs applied to mapping human disease traits. In 1989 he became Directeur Informatique at CEPH in Paris France overseeing the database of CEPH family genotypes, a resource ultimately used by more than 1000 labs in an international consortium to construct the first genetic maps of the human genome. He then joined the US Human Genome Project, first as the Co-Director of the Informatics Core in the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Center, then as Operations Director of the Genome Database at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Subsequently, Bob became Vice President of Computing at Celltech Chiroscience, a UK biopharmaceutical company developing drugs based on gene targets. In 2000 he co-founded Vizx Labs, a bioinformatics company that developed GeneSifter, the first web based gene expression microarray analysis service now used worldwide by hundreds of labs. In 2008 Bob moved to Oak Ridge National Lab where he leads the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics group that currently has projects in the DOE BioEnergy Science Center and Genomes to Life programs.