HHMI’s Sean Eddy Wins 2007 Bioinformatics Franklin Award

March 05, 2007 | Sean Eddy, one of the founding principal scientists at the new Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus in Northern Virginia, has won the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences.

The annual award, bestowed by the Bioinformatics Organization (Bioinformatics.Org), is presented to an individual who, in the words of the organization, “promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.”

Eddy earned recognition as a tireless champion for openness in science. He is the open-source author of HMMER, and its free distribution to academic and commercial users has revolutionized the use of profile Hidden Markov Models in protein sequence analysis. (Profile HMMs were introduced to bioinformatics by Anders Krogh and David Haussler.)

His creation (together with Erick Sonnhammer) and subsequent development (along with Alex Bateman and colleagues) of the Pfam family database has been an essential counterpart as the basis of genome annotations, family classification systems such as GO, and much of the common language of protein annotation. Eddy also did pioneering work on small RNAs, helping to launch a rapidly moving field. Many of his open-access software tools and analyses have had important effects on the field of bioinformatics.

Eddy was nominated by members of the 20,000-strong Bioinformatics Organization. The other finalists for the 2007 award were Robert Gentleman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), who was pivotal in the development of the Bioconductor R module, which explores the use of statistical computing in computational biology; Indiana University’s Don Gilbert, who established the IUBio Archive and played a major role in establishing model organism databases; and Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland), a vocal proponent of free sharing of data among scientists and distributor of many open-access software tools.

Eddy will receive his award in a presentation at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, in Boston on May 2, at 8:55 a.m. Following the presentation, Eddy will deliver a lecture about his research.

The award is named for Benjamin Franklin -- scientist, inventor, statesman -- who freely shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions. Past Franklin laureates include Michael Ashburner (2006), Ewan Birney (2005), Lincoln Stein (2004), James Kent (2003) and Michael Eisen (2002). More information on the Award can be found at http://bioinformatics.org/franklin/.

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