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PRESS RELEASE: Nominees selected for the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award
Submitted by J.W. Bizzaro; posted on Monday, January 05, 2004

The Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. (a.k.a. Bioinformatics.Org) announces the nominees for the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award.

The Benjamin Franklin Award is presented annually by Bioinformatics.Org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the scientific field of bioinformatics.

The Award is named for Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the most remarkable men of his time. Scientist, inventor, statesman, Franklin freely and openly shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions. It is the opinion of the founders of Bioinformatics.Org that he embodied the best traits of a scientist, and we seek to honor those who share these virtues.

At the end of 2003, requests for nominations for the 2004 Award were sent out to more than 8,000 members of Bioinformatics.Org. Any individual who received more than one nomination is considered a nominee and will have their name placed on the ballot for final selection by the membership. The nominees are as follows (included are some of the reasons for nomination, as explained by the nominators):

EWAN BIRNEY of the European Bioinformatics Institute: ``Birney is a respected and important contributor to open-source bioinformatics. His contributions include Bioperl, the Ensembl genome browser, and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, where he serves on the Board of Directors. He also has a demonstrated commitment to open-access for biological data.''

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA of Dartmouth College: ``Gazzaniga is the founder the fMRI Data Center, a multidisciplinary effort to obtain, archive, and openly distribute image data from cerebral blood flow studies of cognitive processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The fMRI Data Center after 3 years of activity now contains over 70 complete fMRI study data sets from articles in the peer-reviewed literature, representing thousands of subjects, 11 million total files, and totaling over 2.6 Terabytes of brain imaging data. These data have been requested and shipped to over 1100 researchers around the world for use in secondary analyses, novel visualization of results, and in education. Professor Gazzaniga has thereby established a fundamental and important resource for the brain, biological, and computational sciences.''

DON GILBERT of Indiana University: ``Gilbert has made long and varied contributions to bioinformatics, from his initial establishment of the IUBio archive and the development of one of the first Internet-available interfaces to GenBank, to the development and release of the widely used program readseq, and from his `loopdloop' to the SeqPup application, to his current work in comprehensive database organization with the Eugenes project.''

LINCOLN STEIN of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: ``Stein has created scores of useful, open-source programs. He has championed open-source principals in many venues. He is currently a co-PI leading the GMOD project to produce open-source software components for model organism databases/websites/etc. His current projects include Generic Genome Browser (web-based genome visualization system), Genome Knowledgebase (ontology of core biological pathways), Gramene (comparative genome browser for grasses), and he is a core developer of Bioperl. Stein is a pioneer in promoting open-source to the greater community of scientists outside of the bioinformatics world. He has argued these principals in published reviews, lectures and seminars, and at funding-review panels and advisor board meetings.''

MATTHEW STEPHENS of the University of Washington: ``Stephens has developed and distributed software for the analysis of population genetics, especially Bayesian approaches for haplotype reconstruction and genotype missing data prediction.''

The ceremony for the presentation of the Award will be held at the Fourth Annual Meeting of Bioinformatics.Org, held in conjunction with the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo, Boston, Massachusetts, March 30 to April 1, 2004. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar. Please see http://bioitworldexpo.com/ for more information on the event.

Past laureates of the Benjamin Franklin Award include Michael Eisen (2002) and James Kent (2003).

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