Dr. Shoshana Wodak

Biography

 Dr. Shoshana Wodak is a university professor, a leading researcher in structural bioinformatics, and an expert in representing and analyzing biological networks and pathways. Dr. Wodak led several research groups in Europe and Canada and advises the Research and Development operations at Cyclica. Dr. Wodak obtained her PhD from Columbia University, New York. She was a professor at the Free University of Brussels for over 20 years, where she founded and co-directed the Center of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics and started a Master’s program in Bioinformatics. She was also the Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) between 1996 and 2001, and has been a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) since 1992. Dr. Wodak served as the Scientific Director of the Centre for Computational Biology at SickKids from 2004-10. She held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from 2005-12 and was a board member at the Centre for Applied Genomics. Dr. Wodak developed one of the first docking algorithms for the prediction of protein-protein interactions from the structure of the independent components and is considered a founder of the field of Structural Bioinformatics. She also developed one of the first procedures for defining structural domains from the atomic coordinates of proteins, and wrote a number of key papers on the role of local interactions in stabilizing the native state, protein structure prediction, protein folding, and fold recognition. Shoshana has contributed research to assessing the quality of protein X-ray structures, the analysis of dynamic and thermodynamic properties of proteins, and protein-solvent interactions. More recently, Dr. Wodak and her team have developed efficient procedures for automatic protein design, for simulating protein interactions and conformational changes, and for analyzing protein interactions networks and cellular pathways. Shoshana serves on the management committee of the annual CAPRI (Critical Assessment of Predicted Interactions) competition and sits on a number of editorial boards.

Research Interest

 representing and analyzing biological networks and pathways