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 where he studied the structural and electrophilic effects of substitution on fully saturated caged hydrocarbon molecules. While a post-doctoral fellow at Sheffield University UK he contributed to the understanding of the structural role of the protein ferritin in iron storage. Later as a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University in New York he proposed mechanisms for the role of caracurines and snake toxins that operate postsynaptically. During the 80's as first the Director of the Cancer Center Computer Facility and later Director of the Medical School Computer Facility at Columbia University he helped establish a tumor registry and various applications and databases in support of patient care. In the early 90's as a Senior Associate of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute he worked on developing high performance hardware and software for computational structural biology. He moved to UCSD in 1995 to work on structural bioinformatics. His current research interests are in structural genomics, the structural basis of evolution and immunology, apoptosis, cell signaling, data and knowledge modeling and scientific visualization.

Philip E. Bourne is an elected Fellow of 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 4 books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies. 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 for his service to open access. He has co-founded four companies.