Medha Bhagwat received her PhD in biochemistry in December 1994 from the University of Maryland at College Park. She did her postdoctoral training at NIDDK, NIH on the structure-function studies of bacteriophage T4 RNase H and its interaction with other proteins at the replication fork.

Medha joined NCBI in 1998 in the GenBank database. Since 2001, she has been involved in a variety of bioinformatics training that NCBI offers. She teaches at the NCBI Core-Bioinformatics Facility, which trains themrepresentatives from the NIH institutes in the use of the NCBI bioinformatics tools in 9-week sessions. She is involved in coordinating a network of bioinformatics specialists serving the individual NIH institutes. Medha also develops and teaches several 2 hour mini-courses (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/minicourses/) which describe the effective usage of a set of bioinformatics tools for solving a scientific problem. The courses have been taught more than 250 times to about 8000 participants.

Courses
Identification of Disease Genes to Phenotypes
Correlation of Disease Genes to Phenotypes
Making Sense of DNA and Protein Sequences

Dr. Cooper earned his Ph.D. in 1996 in Marine Science and has a diverse background in the biological sciences including marine biology, biochemistry and molecular biology. For the past five years, as a biologist on the User Services staff of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, he has provided educational outreach and training programs on the tools and databases of NCBI.

Courses
A Field Guide to NCBI GenBank and NCBI Molecular Biology Resources

Jennifer McDowall provides curation and training for the InterPro database. She has a background in molecular biology and bioinformatics, and has held several research positions in both the pharmaceutical industry and academia, as well as teaching positions at the Open University for biology and genetics. She joined the EBI in 2003 after working on the Human Genome Project, and has given courses and talks on several EBI proteomics databases in numerous locations worldwide.

Courses
Proteomics Workshop

Xosé Fernández is the Project Leader for Ensembl outreach and training. He has a background in molecular biology and bioinformatics, and has held several research positions in both industry and academia in Spain, France and Britain. He joined the Ensembl project in 2003, and has given courses and talks on Ensembl in over 50 locations worldwide.

Courses
Ensembl / BioMart

Phil Jones
Phil Jones is the technical lead software engineer for the PRIDE project. He has a background in both biological sciences and software engineering, and holds a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education. He has held positions in software engineering and in science education. He has given courses and talks on various software development projects in numerous locations worldwide.

Courses
Proteomics Workshop

Helen Parkinson is the curation coordinator for the ArrayExpress, the international repository for microarray data based at the EBI. She has a background in eukaryote genetics and previously worked for the EMBL database. She is an expert in annotation standards for microarray data, and is coordinator of several EU projects.

Courses
Array Express

David Croft is a bioinformatician working for the Reactome team, which is producing a fully curated database of biological processes. His background is in computer science and bioinformatics, and he has worked both in academia and in industry in England and Germany. He has been involved with Reactome since December 2004, and in addition to software related work, has given numerous talks and several seminars on topics related to this area.

Courses
Reactome

Sandra Orchard provides curation for three EBI databases: UniProt, InterPro and IntAct. She has a background in biological sciences, and has held several research positions in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry, including project management. She joined the EBI in 2002 to provide proteomics annotation, and has given courses and talks on several EBI proteomics databases in numerous locations worldwide. She is currently a member of both the Proteomics Standards Initiative and of the Publication Committee of the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO).

Courses
Proteomics Workshop

Sameer Velankar co-ordinates curation and database work for the MSD
database. He has a background in Crystallography and Bioinformatics. He
joined the MSD group in 2000 after a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford
University working on the crystal structures of DNA helicases. At the EBI he
has been involved in development of methodologies for the integration of
information from biological databases and database query systems. He has
given courses and talks on the MSD database and
PDB related activities in numerous locations worldwide.

Course:
Macromolecular Structure Database

Dr. Yannick Pouliot is the Bioresearch Informationist at the Lane Medical Library at Stanford University.

Prior to joining Stanford’s Lane Library, Dr. Pouliot provided bioinformatics consulting to organizations such as SRI International and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Previously, he was Director of Informatics at Kalypsys, a drug discovery startup of the Novartis Genome Research Foundation. Between 1999 and 2001, he was Director of Bioinformatics Knowledge Engineering at DoubleTwist, where he originated the application of automated research agents for biocomputational analysis, ultimately used by 25,000 researchers worldwide. Before that he held senior bioinformatics positions in genomics companies such as Progenitor and Sequana Therapeutics, as well as at software company Molecular Simulations.

Dr. Pouliot received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Biology at McGill University for research in the role of intercellular adhesion in muscle formation, and an M.B.A. in technology management from the University of Phoenix. He did post-graduate studies at the Généthon human genome laboratory in Paris, France.

Courses
Summarizing Candidate Gene Data: The Surprising Power of SOAPed-Up Excel

Daryl Thomas is a graduate student at UCSC.

Courses
Comparative Genomics and Variation

Bob Kuhn is a biologist on the User Services staff of the UCSC Genome Center

Courses
Overview of Genome Resources at UCSC

Heather Trumbower

Courses
UCSC Genome Support for Power Users

Catherine Ball is the director of the Stanford Microarray Database, which is used by hundreds of researchers using microarray technology to address problems that include tumor biology, development, evolution and basic cell biology. Her background in both bench biology and analysis and presentation of genome-scale data enables her to bridge the gap that frequently exists between researchers posing biological questions and the statisticians and computer scientists attempting to provide the means to answer them. Dr. Ball is an active member of the Microarray Gene Expression Data society (MGED) which is working to establish standards for DNA microarray data and experimental descriptions.

Courses
Accessing and Analyzing Public Data with the Stanford Microarray Database