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Realizing Translational Research -
Abstract:
In his previous position, he was the founding Executive Director of the new Bioinformatics Institute (BII) at the Biopolis, Singapore (2001-2007). Currently, the BII consisting of about 140 research scientists and IT professionals is a national research and training institute. Its mission is to advance biomedical/translational research and to create high caliber manpower for the biomedical R&D effort in Singapore. He was head hunted to Singapore from Cambridge to setup up the BII’s research and postgraduate training program as well as leading the Biomedical Research Council’s IT cyber-infrastructure development efforts. The goal was to develop Singapore as THE leading biomedical research, development and manufacturing hub in Asia. To this end, he led the multi-institutional team that was responsible for the planning and implementation of state of the art cyber-infrastructure for the Biopolis that is currently in full operation and meeting the needs of private and public R&D organizations co-located in this biomedical hub. He was aided in this effort by an international team of scientists at the BII working in Systems Biology, Computational Biology, Medical Informatics, Grid Computing applied to Biomedicine etc. His research is focused in the area of Systems Biology i.e. quantitative modeling of signaling and regulatory pathways to understand how biological systems function in their normal and diseased states. In addition to his administrative and management responsibilities, he was: Program Driver for Stem Cell Biology, Cancer Biology and Clinical Biomarker Discovery. He headed the Biomedical Computing Center (BCC), Bioinformatics Graduate Program, was a Co-investigator in Biomedical Research Council Grants and a PI in the Singapore-MIT Flagship Program in Computational and Systems Biology. Prior to his appointment in Singapore, he spent twelve years at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He was Assistant Director of Research in the Theory of Condensed Matter Group, Cavendish Laboratory, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses, was a senior examiner for the Part 3 Physics Tripos and conducted research in theoretical and computational physics. His duties included leading the Cambridge High Performance Computing Facility, a university-wide collaboration funded by the British government and the European Union to advance basic and applied research using high performance computing. He was a Fellow and Director of Studies in Physics at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has supervised postgraduate students and postdocs at Cambridge in theoretical physics and PhD students in Singapore in the area of Systems Biology. He has papers in computational/theoretical physics, computational/systems biology and has received substantial research grants from Research Councils in the US, UK, Singapore and the European Union. He is a member of various professional scientific organizations and has sat on research funding bodies in the UK, Singapore, and European Union. He currently chairs the Bioinformatics Subcommittee for the AACR-NCI-FDA Collaborative in Cancer Biomarker Discovery. Guna has been married for 21 years to Dr. Khaw Lake Ee, a molecular biologist who obtained her doctoral degree from Clare College, Cambridge. Her research interest is in the molecular biology of antibiotics. While in Singapore, she switched to working as Science Officer to the British Ambassador and consultant to the British Council. Lake and Guna are both British citizens and have family worldwide. Guna and Lake are both avid reader, enjoy long walks and classical music for relaxation. Please see: www.bii.a-star.edu.sg/~guna for additional information.
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