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Dr. John Wooley is Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California San Diego, an adjunct Professor of Pharmacology, and of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a Strategic Advisor for the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Among other external appointments, Dr. Wooley serves on The University of Chicago Board of Governors, the Federal Advisory Committee for the US DOE Biological and Environmental Research, the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center Biomedical Computing Research Resource, the UCSF Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization and Informatics, The UCSD National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, and chairs the Resource Advisory Committee for the National Biomedical Computing Resource and also the Singapore Biomedical Research Council Science Advisory Board for the Bioinformatics Institute (BII). He previously held faculty appointments at Princeton University, the Marine Biological Labs and Searle Pharmaceuticals, did postdoctoral research in molecular biology at Harvard University, and received his Ph.D. degree at The University of Chicago, working in biological physics. Along with invigorating and/or creating programs for instrumentation and instrument development, minority postdoctoral training, interdisciplinary graduate education, and other infrastructure for the biological sciences, Dr. Wooley created the first programs within the US federal government for funding research in bioinformatics and in computational biology, and has been involved in strengthening the interface between computing and biology for more than a decade. Recently, on behalf of the National Science Foundation, he explored the requirements for building a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure (i.e., the pervasive use of information technology, networking, and scientific computing) for the biological sciences (under the auspices of the NSF Biological Sciences AC; see http://research.calit2.net/cibio ). Dr. Wooley also chaired a National Research Council study on the opportunities at the interface, which the National Academy of Sciences published (in Dec. 2005) as “Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface between Computing and Biology.”
In establishing and extending the UCSD California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology [Calit2], Dr. Wooley directs the biology and biomedical layer or applications component, termed Digitally-enabled Genomic Medicine (DeGeM). DeGeM is a step in delivering personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory medicine in a wireless clinical setting with access to rich biomedical and health care information. In conjunction with the Center for Research on BioSystems (CRBS), DeGeM is a component of UCSD’s overall systems biology and translational medicine research, which aims at joining medical informatics and modern biomedical research to underpin personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory medicine. His current research involves bioinformatics and structural biology, and he is co-Principal Investigator of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics and UCSD PI for the Bioinformatics Core (BIC). This is a high throughput pipeline funded by the NIH NIGMS Protein Structure Initiative. Dr. Wooley also leads the Calit2 bioinformatics core for CAMERA, a novel “metagenomics” or “microbial community genomics” database project representing the ecological genomics and environmental data on marine microbes with the goals, for example, of providing new insights into evolution, how marine communities survive, and biomedical perspectives on higher organisms provided through deep analyses of microbes. CAMERA is being extended to the organisms living in the human gut, organisms living in urban air, organisms in the soil, and other complex communities of microbes; this larger project is termed CyberMetaGenomics. |
