Dr. Julio Collado Vides

Biography

Julio Collado-Vides obtained a B.Sc. in Basic Biomedical Research (1983), a M.Sc. in Physical Chemistry (1985) and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Research (Biomathematics) (1989) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Upon graduation he spent three years in the laboratory of Dr. Boris Magasanik in Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the Fogarty International Center. In 1992 he was recognized as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and became part of the Center of Nitrogen Fixation (CIFN) at the Morelos Campus of UNAM, in Cuernavaca, in a tenure track position. He is a Professor at UNAM in the area of bioinformatics of regulation of gene expression in bacteria. His work has been recognized in Mexico and abroad. His main contributions include a grammatical model of gene regulation and the computational modeling of regulation of transcription initiation in Escherichia coli, contained in RegulonDB. His focus on gene regulation has contributed to generating algorithms to predict operons, applying bioinformatic methods to predict promoters and binding sites, as well as analyzing the regulatory network and its global properties. He contributed to the annotation of regulation of the complete E.coli genome published in 1997 in Science. He currently has more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed (click on "Publications" --above--) journals, which have been cited more than 8000 times, as well as over 13 chapters in books. Additionally, he is editor of the books "Integrative Approaches to Molecular Biology" eds. Collado-Vides J., Smith T. and Magasanik B. (1996), and "Gene Regulation and Metabolism: Post-Genomic Computational Approaches" eds. Collado-Vides J. and Hofestadt R. (2002), both published by MIT Press. He is a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Science; he has also been President Founder of the Mexican Society of Genomics (2000), and was recognized with the National University Award in Natural Science Research 2004 and the Scopus Elsevier recognition for his highly cited publications in 2007. His laboratory is responsible for the Bioinformatics Mexican National Node EMBNET and he was appointed Director of the Center for Genomic Sciences from 2005 to 2009. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology, an invited member for program committees of international conferences in his area, and an organizer of various international conferences. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States have invited him to participate in three occasions to be part of grant evaluation panels in the areas of genomics, computational biology, technology and modeling. He has also evaluated grant applications from the National Science Foundation, Human Frontiers, the German Human Genome Project and book proposals to the MIT Press amongst others. He is a member of the International E.coli Alliance since 2002. Dr. Collado-Vides has been awarded with grants from DOE as co-responsible investigator, and is one of the few researchers in our country with grants awarded by NIH as PI (Principal Investigator). He was awarded with the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professorship of the Americas from Harvard University in 2007, and was invited to contribute to the inaugural section on Computational Biology of the Journal of Bacteriology, 2009. He is currently President of the recently founded Iberoamerican Society for Bioinformatics. Dr. Collado-Vides has mentored several undergraduate and graduate students. Some of his former students and posdocs are now investigators at UNAM, Cuba, Canada, the US, France, Spain and Belgium. He has collaborated in the creation of the Undergraduate Program of Genomics at UNAM, where he participates in overseeing and teaching courses in bioinformatics. He has also coordinated courses addressed to the teachers of the UNAM's National High school in an attempt to bring genomics to upper middle education.

Research Interest

Genetics