Lars Juhl Jensen started his research career in Søren Brunak’s group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), from where he in 2002 received the Ph.D. degree in bioinformatics for his work on non-homology based protein function prediction. During this time, he also developed methods for visualization of microbial genomes, pattern recognition in promoter regions, and microarray analysis. From 2003 to 2008, he was at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) where he worked on literature mining, integration of large-scale experimental datasets, and analysis of biological interaction networks. Since 2009, he has continued this line of research as a professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the Panum Institute in Copenhagen and as a founder, owner and scientific advisor of Intomics A/S. He is a co-author of more than 170 scientific publications that have in total received more than 20,000 citations. He was awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize in 2003, his work on cell-cycle research was named “Break-through of the Year” in 2006 by the magazine Ingeniøren, his work on text mining won the first prize in the “Elsevier Grand Challenge: Knowledge Enhancement in the Life Sciences” in 2009, and he was awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Prize for Young Scientists in 2010.

Dr. Pearson received his PhD in Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 1983, he joined the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Virginia, and, while waiting to recruit his first graduate student, wrote the FASTP program for rapid protein similarity searches (working with David Lipman). FASTP evolved into FASTA, which revolutionized the process of making DNA and protein sequence comparisons by providing faster, more rigorous approaches and improved scoring techniques. The FASTA text-based sequence format became a standard format in bioinformatics. FASTA is the second most widely used program for searching protein and DNA sequence databases. More recently, Dr. Pearson has become interested in more effective strategies for integrating sequence annotations into sequence alignments. Dr. Pearson has published more than 75 articles and 23 book chapters. His 1988 PNAS paper co-authored with David Lipman, “Improved tools for Biological Sequence Comparison”, has been cited more than 10,000 times.
Dr. Pearson is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He speaks widely on bioinformatics topics, teaches a course in computational biology at the University of Virginia, has co-directed the CSHL Computational and Comparative Genomics course for 20 years, and participated in the Woods Hole Workshop on Molecular Evolution since 1995. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.

My undergraduate degree was in Applied Physics at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), and I obtained my Ph.D. in 2001 in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was first introduced to computational biology. I did a postdoc in bioinformatics first at the University of Tokyo and then at Columbia University in New York, and in 2007 I moved to RIKEN in Yokohama where I am now team leader of the Laboratory of Applied Computational Genomics in the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences. At RIKEN I have been heavily involved in the FANTOM (Functional Annotation of Mammalian Genomes) project, a large consortium effort to understand the mammalian (mainly human and mouse) genome and transcriptome. I am currently co-leading (together with Jay Shin and Piero Carninci at RIKEN) the sixth edition of FANTOM, where our goal is to functionally classify and annotate long non-coding RNAs.