Dr. Amos Bairoch Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, Swiss E-mail : amos.bairoch@isb-sib.ch Web-site : http://www.expasy.org/people/personal/amos/amos_home.html

Professor of Bioinformatics and Director of the Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Geneva, Amos Bairoch is head of the Swiss-Prot group of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, which develops the Swiss-Prot knowledgebase as well as PROSITE, a database of protein families and domains and ENZYME, a database of information on the nomenclature of enzymes.

He is also co-responsible for the development of ExPASy, the world’s first web site dedicated to protein molecular biology. Amos Bairoch’s main work lies in the field of protein sequence analysis and the development of databases and software tools for this purpose. His first project, as a Ph.D student, was the development of PC/Gene, an MS-DOS based software package for the analysis of protein and nucleotide sequences. While working on PC/Gene he started to develop an annotated protein sequence database, which became Swiss-Prot, first released in July 1986. From 1988 onward it has been a collaborative project with the Data Library group of the EMBL, which has now become the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Swiss-Prot has grown both in size, in its scope and in the amount of work and people necessary to produce it. Since 2003, the Swiss-Prot team is part of the UniProt consortium, and together with the EBI and PIR (Proteom Information Resource) produces the world most comprehensive protein database: UniProtKb/Swiss-Prot, as well as UniProtKb/TrEmbl, UniRef and UniParc.

In 1998, Amos Bairoch with colleagues in Geneva and Lausanne, has set up the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), whose mission is to establish in Switzerland a centre of excellence in the field of bioinformatics with an emphasis on research, education, services and the developments of databases and tools. He is currently one of the 21 group leaders of the SIB. Amos has been awarded several distinctions, the last of which is George F. Jauber prize, awarded in 2007. For additional information, see: http://www.expasy.org/people/personal/amos/amos_home.html