GPBA Announces Fellow Award Recipients

Philadelphia – December 3, 2004 – The Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance (GPBA) today announced the first recipients of the BioAdvance Fellow Awards in Bioinformatics. BioAdvance, the Biotechnology Greenhouse of Southeastern Pennsylvania, is launching the new fellowship program to support innovative regional bioinformatics researchers and will award $35,000 to each of two promising graduate students in bioinformatics and computational biology at GPBA member universities. Both candidates have a history of successful collaboration across institutions and disciplines. Award recipients were selected from candidates nominated by committees from Thomas Jefferson University and University of Pennsylvania. The 2004 BioAdvance Fellow Award recipients are Rishi Lee Khan and Marcin Imielinski.

Rishi Lee Khan is a joint-degree candidate working towards a cross-disciplinary Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering and pathology, anatomy, and cell biology. Rishi’s research at Thomas Jefferson University focuses on linking in vivo physiology to microarray-based gene expression analysis, and novel data analysis approaches to better understand how neurons adapt to acute hypertension,. It is expected that the approach will lead to interesting insights into receptor-driven neuronal adaptation.

Marcin Imielinski is a candidate for a joint M.D./Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania using systems biology approaches to develop dynamic models of genome-scale metabolic processes and gene regulatory networks. Currently working on developing algorithmic approaches for characterizing the capabilities of metabolic networks on a genome scale, Marcin’s initial months of work in the laboratory are already resulting in publishable work. These types of advances in bioinformatics are considered essential if systems biology is to fulfill its ambitious promise.

“We believe that bioinformatics is an essential ingredient in our region’s accelerating emergence as an important center for the development and commercialization of biomedical innovation, and we are proud to fund the promising research of these first two BioAdvance Fellow Award recipients,” said Gary Kurtzman, M.D, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of BioAdvance. “Both have demonstrated the capacity to conduct major work in the field, and we look forward to their contributions to bioinformatics, their institutions, the region, and ultimately to healthcare and medicine.”

Graduate bioinformatics programs are crucial to the development of a bioinformatics work force, which is in turn critical for the vitality of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries in the Greater Philadelphia region. The BioAdvance Fellow Award program will both promote the development and visibility of nascent and existing programs at Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance universities and foster interactions with area industries. The program will be overseen by a Committee formed by the GPBA member institutions.