Immunoinformatics

Immunoinformatics uses mathematics, information science, computer engineering, genomics, proteomics, and immunological methods to bridge immunology and informatics. In contrast to existing books on immunoinformatics that emphasize epitope prediction, this volume presents a cross-section of immunoinformatics research. The contributions highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the field and how collaborative efforts among bioinformaticians and bench scientists result in innovative strategies for understanding the immune system. Immunoinformatics is ideal for scientists and students in immunology, bioinformatics, microbiology, genetics, systems biology, biotechnology, and computational biology. This is the first volume in a series dedicated to advances in immunomics, focusing on systemic and integrative approaches in basic and clinical immunology, immunoinformatics, and immunologically relevant instrumentation and high-throughput screening methods.

Christian Schönbach is currently an Associate Professor (Genetics and Genomics) at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Until recently he was Team Leader of the Immunoinformatics Team at the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center (Japan). His research on decoding mouse genome information employs both computational and experimental methods. He obtained is higher education at University of Würzburg, SUNY Albany, University of Tübingen, Max-Planck Institute for Biology, and UCSD. He holds a doctor degree in Genetics obtained through immunogenetics research under Jan Klein at the Max-Planck Institute for Biology. He completed his post-doctoral training in experimental and computational immunology with Masafumi Takiguchi and Kohji Egawa at The University of Tokyo, Institute of Medical Science.

His working experience includes research scientist in gene discovery and bioinformatics at Chugai Research Institute for Molecular Medicine, Inc. (Japan), visiting scientist in immunology at the University of Tokyo, principal investigator in computational immunology at Kent Ridge Digital Labs, and Team Leader at RIKEN GSC where he interfaced for its bioinformatics group between computer science and experimental biology. Besides he contributed to the RIKEN GSC large-scale project ‘Functional Annotation of Mouse’ as a senior annotation manager and core group member.

C. Schönbach authored 55 publications and two patents. He is a founding member of the International Immunomics Society, section editor for Immunome Research and served as editorial board member of New Generation Computing. He contributed as program committee member to various international bioinformatics meetings and to international conferences as invited speaker, keynote speaker, and memorial lecturer. In 2004 he convened the 1^st International Immunoinformatics Symposium at RIKEN GSC.

Shoba Ranganathan is currently Chair Professorof Bioinformatics at Macquarie University (Australia). She is also Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research is focused on bioinformatics analysis at the genome, transcriptome and proteome levels. She holds a doctorate degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India under the supervision of A.S.N. Murthy, followed by post-doctoral training in biocomputing with Bernard Pullamn and Alberte Pullman at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Paris, France.

Her working experience includes academic positions at the University of New Orleans, USA; University of Delhi, India; University of Sydney, Australia; Australian National University and the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

S. Ranganathan has authored 77 publications. She was the first Australian Director elected to the Board of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and is currently the President, Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBionet) and Steering Committee member of the International Immunomics Society. She is an editorial board member and reviewer for several bioinformatics journals and has served on the organizing committee of various international conferences.

Vladimir Brusic is the Director of Bioinformatics, Cancer Vaccine Centre, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts USA, the Professor of Bioinformatics and Database Management at the University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at The National University of Singapore. His research is focused on translational bioinformatics, particularly applications in immunomics and vaccine development. He has been a pioneer in the field of immunoinformatics and introduced the use of several machine learning techniques into the study of immunology. He has a PhD from LaTrobe University, Australia. He has master degrees in Biomedical Engineering, Applied Science, and Business Administration. He worked at University of Belgrade (Serbia), Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (Australia), and Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore).

Dr Brusic published more than 130 scientific articles and two patents. He is the founding Vice-president of the international Immunomics Society. He is a member of editorial boards and reviewer for several journals and has served on the program committees of numerous international conferences.