Christophe Dessimoz

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.[5][3][6][7][8] He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology.[2]

Christophe Dessimoz
Christophe Dessimoz speaking at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) / European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Basel, 2019
Born	Christophe Dessimoz 1980 (age 39–40)
Alma mater	ETH Zurich (MSc, PhD)
Known for	Orthologous MAtrix (OMA)[1]
Awards	Overton Prize (2019)[2]
Scientific career
Fields	Bioinformatics Genomics Phylogenetics Evolution Computational Biology[3]
Institutions	University of Lausanne European Bioinformatics Institute University College London Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Thesis	Comparative Genomics Using Pairwise Evolutionary Distances (2009)
Doctoral advisor	Gaston Gonnet[4]
Website	lab.dessimoz.org/people/christophe-dessimoz

Education

Dessimoz obtained his Master of Science degree in 2003[5] and PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from ETH Zurich in Switzerland[9] where his doctoral research was supervised by Gaston Gonnet[4] and examined by Amos Bairoch.[9]

Career and research

After postdoctoral research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire,[10] he joined University College London (UCL) as lecturer in 2013, and was promoted to Reader in 2015.[5] In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as professor, retaining an appointment at UCL.[11] Since 2016, Dessimoz has served as group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics[5] where his research interests are in bioinformatics, genomics, phylogenetics, evolution and computational biology.[3][12][13][14][15]

Dessimoz is known for his management of the Orthologous MAtrix (OMA)[1] which provides information on orthologous proteins. OMA has important applications in protein function prediction.[2] Dessimoz's approach to benchmarking had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference, sequence alignment, and the gene ontology (GO).[2][16][17]

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.[2]

References

1. Altenhoff, Adrian M; Glover, Natasha M; Train, Clément-Marie; Kaleb, Klara; Warwick Vesztrocy, Alex; Dylus, David; de Farias, Tarcisio M; Zile, Karina; Stevenson, Charles; Long, Jiao; Redestig, Henning; Gonnet, Gaston H; Dessimoz, Christophe (2018). "The OMA orthology database in 2018: retrieving evolutionary relationships among all domains of life through richer web and programmatic interfaces". Nucleic Acids Research. 46 (D1): D477–D485. doi:10.1093/nar/gkx1019. ISSN 0305-1048. PMC 5753216. PMID 29106550.
2. Kovats, Diane; Shamir, Ron; Fogg, Christiana (2019). "2019 ISCB Overton Prize: Christophe Dessimoz". F1000Research. 8: 722. doi:10.12688/f1000research.19220.1. ISSN 2046-1402. PMC 6534074. PMID 31164977.
3. Christophe Dessimoz publications indexed by Google Scholar
4. Christophe Dessimoz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
5. Dessimoz, Christophe (2019). "Dessimoz Lab". lab.dessimoz.org.
6. Christophe Dessimoz publications from Europe PubMed Central
7. Christophe Dessimoz publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
8. Christophe Dessimoz on Twitter
9. Dessimoz, Christophe (2009). Comparative Genomics Using Pairwise Evolutionary Distances. ethz.ch (PhD thesis). ETH Zurich. doi:10.3929/ethz-a-005762050. OCLC 935351416.
10. Goldman, Nick; Bertone, Paul; Chen, Siyuan; Dessimoz, Christophe; LeProust, Emily M.; Sipos, Botond; Birney, Ewan (2013). "Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA". Nature. 494 (7435): 77–80. Bibcode:2013Natur.494...77G. doi:10.1038/nature11875. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 3672958. PMID 23354052.
11. "Dr Christophe Dessimoz". ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 6 March 2019.
12. Wodak, Shoshana; Sunnåker, Mikael; Busetto, Alberto Giovanni; Numminen, Elina; Corander, Jukka; Foll, Matthieu; Dessimoz, Christophe (2013). "Approximate Bayesian Computation". PLoS Computational Biology. 9 (1): e1002803. Bibcode:2013PLSCB...9E2803S. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002803. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 3547661. PMID 23341757.
13. Anisimova, Maria; Gil, Manuel; Dufayard, Jean-François; Dessimoz, Christophe; Gascuel, Olivier (2011). "Survey of Branch Support Methods Demonstrates Accuracy, Power, and Robustness of Fast Likelihood-based Approximation Schemes". Systematic Biology. 60 (5): 685–699. doi:10.1093/sysbio/syr041. ISSN 1076-836X. PMC 3158332. PMID 21540409.
14. Eisen, Jonathan A.; Altenhoff, Adrian M.; Dessimoz, Christophe (2009). "Phylogenetic and Functional Assessment of Orthologs Inference Projects and Methods". PLoS Computational Biology. 5 (1): e1000262. Bibcode:2009PLSCB...5E0262A. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000262. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 2612752. PMID 19148271.
15. Abbosh, Christopher; Birkbak, Nicolai J.; Wilson, Gareth A.; Jamal-Hanjani, Mariam; Constantin, Tudor; Salari, Raheleh; Le Quesne, John; Moore, David A.; Veeriah, Selvaraju; Rosenthal, Rachel; Marafioti, Teresa; et al. (2017). "Phylogenetic ctDNA analysis depicts early-stage lung cancer evolution". Nature. 545 (7655): 446–451. Bibcode:2017Natur.545..446A. doi:10.1038/nature22364. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 5812436. PMID 28445469.
16. Dessimoz, Christophe (2017). Dessimoz, Christophe; Škunca, Nives (eds.). The Gene Ontology Handbook. Methods in Molecular Biology. 1446. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-3743-1. ISBN 9781493937431. ISSN 1064-3745.
17. Gaudet, Pascale; Škunca, Nives; Hu, James C.; Dessimoz, Christophe (2017). "Primer on the Gene Ontology". The Gene Ontology Handbook. Methods in Molecular Biology. 1446. pp. 25–37. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-3743-1_3. ISBN 978-1-4939-3741-7. ISSN 1064-3745. PMC 6377150. PMID 27812933.