Christopher Boyce Burge is Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Education

Burge completed his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1990, and continued graduate studies in

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 ...

at Stanford University, gaining his

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 1997 under the supervision of

Samuel Karlin Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century. Biography Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish hous ...

. During his time at Stanford he was responsible for developing algorithms for

GENSCAN In bioinformatics, GENSCAN is a program to identify complete gene structures in genomic DNA. It is a G HMM-based program that can be used to predict the location of genes and their exon-intron boundaries in genomic sequences from a variety of org ...

used in

gene prediction In computational biology, gene prediction or gene finding refers to the process of identifying the regions of genomic DNA that encode genes. This includes protein-coding genes as well as RNA genes, but may also include prediction of other functiona ...

for example the initial analysis of the

Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a ...

. His PhD thesis was titled ''Identification of genes in human genomic DNA''.

Research

From 1997 to 1999 Burge worked as a

postdoc A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...

in the laboratory of

Phillip Allen Sharp Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryo ...

, working in the fields of

RNA splicing RNA splicing is a process in molecular biology where a newly-made precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) transcript is transformed into a mature messenger RNA (mRNA). It works by removing all the introns (non-coding regions of RNA) and ''splicing'' b ...

and

molecular evolution Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics ...

. Burge joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 as a

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 ...

Fellow. He became Assistant Professor in 2002, Associate Professor in 2004, was tenured in 2006, and was promoted to full Professor in 2010. He has been an Associate Member of the

Broad Institute The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U ...

since 2004. His current research interests include

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 ...

, RNA splicing and

microRNA MicroRNA (miRNA) are small, single-stranded, non-coding RNA molecules containing 21 to 23 nucleotides. Found in plants, animals and some viruses, miRNAs are involved in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRN ...

regulation. Burge has also served on the editorial boards of the academic journals ''

RNA Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA) are nucleic acids. Along with lipids, proteins, and carbohydra ...

'', ''

PLOS Computational Biology ''PLOS Computational Biology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering computational biology. It was established in 2005 by the Public Library of Science in association with the International Society for Computational B ...

'', ''

BMC Bioinformatics ''BMC Bioinformatics'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering bioinformatics and computational biology published by BioMed Central. It was established in 2000, and has been one of the fastest growing and most successful journals ...

'' and ''

BMC Genomics ''BMC Genomics'' is an open-access scientific journal covering all areas of genomics and proteomics. The journal was established in 2000 and is published by BioMed Central. The editor-in-chief is Matteo Pasini. Its 2021 impact factor is 4.56. Abs ...

Awards

In 2001 he was awarded the

Overton Prize The ISCB Overton Prize is a Awards in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significan ...

for Computational Biology by the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

. He was awarded a

Searle Scholar Award The Searle Scholars Program is a career development award made annually to the 15 young US professionals in biomedical research and chemistry considered most promising. The award was established in 1980 by a donation from the Searle family, and is ...

in 2003 for his research in the computational biology of

gene expression Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, protein or non-coding RNA, and ultimately affect a phenotype, as the final effect. The ...

. In 2007 he was awarded the Schering-Plough Research Institute Award (now known as the ASBMB Young Investigator Award) by the

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) is a learned society that was founded on December 26, 1906, at a meeting organized by John Jacob Abel (Johns Hopkins University). The roots of the society were in the American Phy ...

for his outstanding research contributions to biochemistry and molecular biology.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Burge, Christopher Stanford University alumni Overton Prize winners Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty American bioinformaticians 1968 births Living people Whitehead Institute faculty Human Genome Project scientists