PLoS Computational Biology Editor-in-Chief

Biography for Philip E. Bourne

Philip E. Bourne is a Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB), Senior Advisor to the Life Sciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute.

Philip E. Bourne received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Flinders University of South Australia in 1980. In the early 80’s he was a postdoctoral fellow in structural biology, first at the University of Sheffield, UK and later at Columbia University, New York. During the late 80's as first the Director of the Columbia University Cancer Center Computer Facility and later as Director of the Medical School Computer Facility he worked in computational biology and medical informatics. In the early 90's he joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and worked on developing high performance hardware and software for computational structural biology. He moved to the University of California San Diego in 1995 to work on structural bioinformatics. His current research interests are in structural genomics, the structural basis of evolution, immunology, apoptosis, cell signaling, and drug discovery, while developing new methods for data and knowledge modeling, scientific visualization and scholarly communication.

Philip E. Bourne is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Medical Informatics Association and past President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He is the author of over 200 scientific papers and author of 4 books, including text books in structural bioinformatics and pharmacy informatics. He has received two UCSD Connect Awards for new inventions in the areas of comparative protein structure analysis and shared visualization. He was the recipient of the 2002 Sun Microsystems Convergence Award and the 2004 Convocation Medal for career achievement from his graduate university. Most recently he was the recipient of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award and 2010 Jim Gray eScience Award for his service to open science. He has co-founded four companies, including SciVee.tv.