Office of Information Technology Becomes Computational Genomics Group
During the past year, a number of changes have occurred in the organization of information technology (IT) and bioinformatic research in Lausanne. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has now been re-incorporated into the Lausanne Branch as the ‘Computational Genomics Group,’ headed by Dr. Victor Jongeneel.
The OIT was created in January 1998 to enable the entire Institute to access a group with strong experience in both general IT and in bioinformatics. After nine years of activity during which the OIT supported numerous Institute research and administrative projects, the LICR Directorate decided that there is sufficient computational resources and know-how to manage projects within each Branch, and that administrative IT should be more tightly coupled to the LICR's central administration. Therefore, the OIT has now officially closed, with the staff members now able to focus solely on their own investigator-driven research in the field of computational genomics.
The Computational Genomics Group is located with the Lausanne Branch’s Molecular Modeling Group, headed by Dr. Olivier Michielin, in the Center for Integrative Genomics of the University of Lausanne and not with the rest of the Branch in Epalinges. The group profits from sharing offices with the Vital-IT high-performance computing center of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Bioinformatics Core Facility of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Molecular Oncology.
The current members of the Computational Genomics Group are Dr. Brian Stevenson (Associate Investigator), Drs. Christian Iseli and Lorenzo Cerutti (Assistant Investigators), Armand Valsesia (graduate student) and Dr. Monique Zahn (Assistant Editor of Cancer Immunity). The leader of the group, Dr. Victor Jongeneel, has taken up a new position as Vice President for Research of the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia as of September 2007, but continues to oversee the group's scientific activities remotely and through regular visits to Lausanne.
Read here about the Computational Genomics Group's assembly of human and mouse transcriptomes.