Eugene Koonin, PhD

Eugene Koonin is Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine. He has a Biology diploma (equivalent to MSc ) summa cum laude and his PhD in biology from Moscow State University. Prior to coming to NCBI, Dr. Koonin was Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Virus Biochemistry, Institute of Poliomyelitis, Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Bacterial Genetics and Head of the Laboratory of Gene Systematics and Bacterial Evolution, Institute of Microbiology, all of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Based on his research in computational biology analyzing the complete genome sequences of several cellular life forms, he has predicted the function of many families of proteins. Furthermore, he has delineated clusters of orthologous and paralogous protein groups, compared the gene organization in different organisms, determined a minimal gene set for cellular life, and reconstructed biochemical pathways in a variety of completely sequenced bacterial and archeal genomes. He also has done leading-edge research in the field of sequence analysis by developing a technique for analysis of protein motifs. Dr. Koonin is Editor of Archaea and of the ìGenome Analysisî section in Trends in Genetics. He is a member of the editorial boards of Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, and In Silico Biology. He has received the National Library of Medicine's Regents Award.