Chris Sander is a computational biologist based at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. Previously he was chair of the Computational Biology Programme at the

Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK or MSKCC) is a cancer treatment and research institution in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. MSKCC is one of 52 National Cancer Institute� ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. In 2015, he moved his lab to the

Dana–Farber Cancer Institute Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is a comprehensive cancer treatment and research institution in Boston, Massachusetts. Dana–Farber is the founding member of Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Harvard's Comprehensive Cancer Center designated by ...

and the Cell Biology Department at

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

Education

Sander originally trained as a physicist receiving his undergraduate degree from the

University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative ...

in 1967. After a period studying at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and the

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute (Danish: ''Niels Bohr Institutet'') is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics and biophysics ...

in Copenhagen, he gained his PhD degree in theoretical physics from the State University of New York in 1975. His thesis was titled ''Analytic properties of bound state wave functions''.

Research

Sander credits his move from theoretical physics to computational biology to

Fred Sanger Frederick Sanger (; 13 August 1918 – 19 November 2013) was an English biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice. He won the 1958 Chemistry Prize for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin and numerous othe ...

's 1977 landmark paper in ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

'', in which the nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage φX174 was published. Sander has made many contributions to the field of structural bioinformatics including developing tools such as the

Families of Structurally Similar Proteins Families of Structurally Similar Proteins or FSSP is a database of structurally superimposed proteins generated using the "Distance-matrix ALIgnment" (DALI) algorithm.The database currently contains an extended structural family for each of 330 repr ...

(FSSP) database and the DSSP algorithm for assigning secondary structure to the

amino acid Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha a ...

s of a protein, given the atomic-resolution coordinates of that protein. Sander has also worked at the

European Bioinformatics Institute The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wel ...

, has served as chief information officer for the biopharmaceutical company

Millennium Pharmaceuticals Takeda Oncology (originally Millennium Pharmaceuticals) is a biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a fully owned subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceutical. Takeda Oncology's research, development and commercialization act ...

and has been an advisor to IBM's Deep Computing Initiative, which produced the Deep Blue chess computer.

Awards and honours

Sander is a former Executive Editor for the journal '' Bioinformatics''. In 2014 he was appointed one of the first Honorary Editors of ''Bioinformatics''. Sander was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award in 2010. He was awarded the 2018 DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences.

Personal life

Sander is the brother of German actor

Otto Sander Otto Sander (; 30 June 1941 – 12 September 2013) was a German film, theater, and voice actor. Life Education and early career Sander grew up in Kassel, where he graduated in 1961 from the Friedrichgymnasium. After leaving school he s ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sander, Chris American bioinformaticians Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Computational chemists Year of birth missing (living people) Humboldt University of Berlin alumni