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 The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinfor ...

. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB

, along with

Ron Appel Ron David Appel (born 13 April 1959) is a Swiss bioinformatician, professor of proteomics and bioinformatics at the University of Geneva and executive director of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Education Ron Appel graduated in Comput ...

Education

Dessimoz obtained his Master of Science degree in 2003 and

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in Computer Science in 2009 from

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

where his doctoral research was supervised by Gaston Gonnet and examined by Amos Bairoch.

Career and research

After postdoctoral research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, he joined University College London (UCL) as

lecturer Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...

in 2013, and was promoted to Reader in 2015. In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as professor, retaining an appointment at UCL. Since 2016, Dessimoz has served as group leader at the

where his research interests are in

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

, phylogenetics, evolution and

. Dessimoz is known for his management of the Orthologous MAtrix (OMA) which provides information on orthologous proteins. OMA has important applications in

protein function prediction Protein function prediction methods are techniques that bioinformatics researchers use to assign biological or biochemical roles to proteins. These proteins are usually ones that are poorly studied or predicted based on genomic sequence data. Thes ...

. Dessimoz's approach to

benchmarking Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is used to measure performan ...

had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference,

sequence alignment In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Alig ...

, and the gene ontology (GO).

Awards and honours

Dessimoz was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to computational biology.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dessimoz, Christophe Swiss bioinformaticians 1980 births Living people ETH Zurich alumni University of Lausanne faculty