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Christos Ouzounis

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Christos Ouzounis
Born
Christos A. Ouzounis

1965 (age 58–59)
Greece
Alma materAristotle University of Thessaloniki (BSc)
University of York (MSc, PhD)
Scientific career
FieldsComputational Biology
Systems Biomedicine
Bioinformatics
Evolution[1]
InstitutionsEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory
SRI International
European Bioinformatics Institute[2]
King's College London
Centre for Research & Technology Hellas[3]
ThesisThe role of sequence conservation in the prediction of protein structure. (1993)
Doctoral advisorChris Sander
Websitebcplab.wordpress.com/who/director

Christos A. Ouzounis is a computational biologist, a director of research at the CERTH, and Professor of Bioinformatics at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.[4][5][1][6]

Education

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Ouzounis received his undergraduate degree (B.Sc.) in Biological Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in 1987.[4] He then received an M.Sc. in Biological Computation from the University of York in 1988[4] and went on to perform doctoral work with Chris Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany receiving his PhD from the University of York in 1993.[4][7]

Career and research

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After his PhD, Ouzounis was a Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) Postdoctoral fellow at SRI International, Menlo Park, California. Ouzounis started his own laboratory, researching computational genomics, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 1996.

He then moved his laboratory to King's College London (KCL), as a Professor, Chair and Director of the KCL Centre for Bioinformatics in 2007. Following the restructuring at King's in 2009/2010, he returned to Greece, joining CPERI at CERTH in Thessaloniki. In 2020 he was appointed as Professor of Bioinformatics at AUTH. His research interests include genome structure, function and evolution, evolution of protein function, evolution of genetic information-processing systems, theory and applications of biological sequence comparison, data and knowledge representation for genomics, unsupervised machine learning in very large datasets, biologically-inspired hardware & software engineering (unpublished works), synthetic biology, exobiology, and science communication.

Some of his best known contributions in the field of computational genomics include automated sequence annotation,[8] the discovery of genomic context methods,[9][10][11] the inference of metabolic pathways from genome sequences,[12][13] the development of methods for large-scale clustering of sequence similarities,[14][15] the definition of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) jointly with Nikos Kyrpides,[16][17] and the quantification of horizontal gene transfer patterns across the "net of life".[18] He also maintains a strong interest in the development of computational biology as an exemplary paradigm in the history of contemporary science,[19] emanating from his first-hand experience that saw bioinformatics grow during the 1990s. He cites as mentors his late father Andreas Ouzounis†, Kostas Kastritsis†, Chris Sander, Antoine Danchin and Carl Woese†.

His former PhD students include David Kreil (2001),[citation needed] Anton Enright (2002)[citation needed] JM Peregrin-Alvarez (2003),[citation needed] Victor Kunin (2004)[citation needed] Nikos Darzentas (2005)[citation needed] and Ignat Drozdov (2010).[citation needed]

Awards and honours

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Ouzounis is associate editor for the journal PLOS Computational Biology (since 2007). He is also an associate editor for the journal BioSystems and Honorary Editor for the journal Bioinformatics. He is a founding officer of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the Mikrobiokosmos initiative (Greece), the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics and Hellenic Bioinformatics.[4] He is an active member of the MetaSUB consortium and a board member of Elixir-Europe. He was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto (2011-2014).

He is also a committed adventurer/photographer and a trained RYA windsurfing instructor / amateur windsurfing coach.

References

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  1. ^ a b Christos Ouzounis publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ "From trees of life to scale-free networks: a new vision for bacterial evolution". European Union, CORDIS. CORDIS, European Union.
  3. ^ "Christos A. Ouzounis Biography".
  4. ^ a b c d e "Lifeboat foundation Advisory Board".
  5. ^ "Christos Ouzounis's Bibliography". Retrieved 2019-10-05.
  6. ^ Christos Ouzounis publications from Europe PubMed Central
  7. ^ Ouzounis, Christos (1993). The role of sequence conservation in the prediction of protein structure (PhD thesis). University of York. OCLC 53486615. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.387193.
  8. ^ Casari, G.; Andrade, M. A.; Bork, P.; Boyle, J.; Daruvar, A.; Ouzounis, C.; Schneider, R.; Tamames, J.; Valencia, A.; Sander, C. (1995-08-24). "Challenging times for bioinformatics". Nature. 376 (6542): 647–648. Bibcode:1995Natur.376..647C. doi:10.1038/376647a0. hdl:10993/19513. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 7651513. S2CID 25792350.
  9. ^ Ouzounis, C.; Kyrpides, N. (1996). "The emergence of major cellular processes in evolution". FEBS Letters. 390 (2): 119–123. doi:10.1016/0014-5793(96)00631-x. ISSN 0014-5793. PMID 8706840. S2CID 39128865.
  10. ^ Tamames, J.; Casari, G.; Ouzounis, C.; Valencia, A. (1997). "Conserved clusters of functionally related genes in two bacterial genomes". Journal of Molecular Evolution. 44 (1): 66–73. Bibcode:1997JMolE..44...66T. doi:10.1007/pl00006122. ISSN 0022-2844. PMID 9010137. S2CID 26625775.
  11. ^ Enright, A. J.; Iliopoulos, I.; Kyrpides, N. C.; Ouzounis, C. A. (1999). "Protein interaction maps for complete genomes based on gene fusion events". Nature. 402 (11): 87–90. Bibcode:1999Natur.402...86E. doi:10.1038/47056. PMID 10573422. S2CID 4417772.
  12. ^ Karp, P. D.; Ouzounis, C.; Paley, S. (1996). "HinCyc: A knowledge base of the complete genome and metabolic pathways of H. Influenzae". Proceedings. International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology. 4: 116–124. ISSN 1553-0833. PMID 8877511.
  13. ^ Karp, Peter D.; Ouzounis, Christos A.; Moore-Kochlacs, Caroline; Goldovsky, Leon; Kaipa, Pallavi; Ahrén, Dag; Tsoka, Sophia; Darzentas, Nikos; Kunin, Victor; López-Bigas, Núria (2005). "Expansion of the BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases to 160 genomes". Nucleic Acids Research. 33 (19): 6083–6089. doi:10.1093/nar/gki892. ISSN 1362-4962. PMC 1266070. PMID 16246909.
  14. ^ Enright, A. J.; van Dongen, S.; Ouzounis, C. A. (2002). "An efficient algorithm for large-scale detection of protein families". Nucleic Acids Research. 30 (7): 1575–1584. doi:10.1093/nar/30.7.1575. PMC 101833. PMID 11917018.
  15. ^ Kunin, Victor; Ahren, Dag; Goldovsky, Leon; Janssen, Paul; Ouzounis, Christos A. (2005). "Measuring genome conservation across taxa: divided strains and united kingdoms". Nucleic Acids Research. 33 (2): 616–621. doi:10.1093/nar/gki181. ISSN 1362-4962. PMC 548337. PMID 15681613.
  16. ^ Kyrpides, N.; Overbeek, R.; Ouzounis, C. (1999). "Universal protein families and the functional content of the last universal common ancestor". Journal of Molecular Evolution. 49 (4): 413–423. Bibcode:1999JMolE..49..413K. doi:10.1007/pl00006564. ISSN 0022-2844. PMID 10485999. S2CID 14597850.
  17. ^ Ouzounis, Christos A.; Kunin, Victor; Darzentas, Nikos; Goldovsky, Leon (2006). "A minimal estimate for the gene content of the last universal common ancestor--exobiology from a terrestrial perspective". Research in Microbiology. 157 (1): 57–68. doi:10.1016/j.resmic.2005.06.015. ISSN 0923-2508. PMID 16431085.
  18. ^ Kunin, Victor; Goldovsky, Leon; Darzentas, Nikos; Ouzounis, Christos A. (2005). "The net of life: reconstructing the microbial phylogenetic network". Genome Research. 15 (7): 954–959. doi:10.1101/gr.3666505. ISSN 1088-9051. PMC 1172039. PMID 15965028.
  19. ^ Ouzounis, Christos A. (2012). "Rise and demise of bioinformatics? Promise and progress". PLOS Computational Biology. 8 (4): e1002487. Bibcode:2012PLSCB...8E2487O. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002487. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 3343106. PMID 22570600.
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