ACADEMIA

Victor Jongeneel is joining the University of Illinois as a senior research scientist at both the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Jongeneel will be developing a biomedical informatics program that brings together resources and expertise at both research centers and across the Illinois campus and will engage institutions worldwide to partner in the new program.

"Biomedical science is entering a new area that promises to revolutionize healthcare; the revolution will be data driven, involving massive amounts of data," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "The new biomedical informatics program represents a powerful cross-campus collaboration, bringing together the computing expertise and resources of NCSA and the biology and biomedical expertise of IGB. Victor is just the right person to leverage what these two powerhouses as well as the entire campus have to offer."

Jongeneel most recently was the vice president of research and a professor of computational biology at the Cyprus Institute, as well as an associate professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne and a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Previously, he was founding director of the Swiss Bioinformatics Institute and later led its Vital-IT High-Performance Computing Center. Jongeneel received a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Lic.Sc. in natural sciences from the University of Lausanne.

For more information about the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, see www.ncsa.illinois.edu. For more information about the Institute for Genomic Biology, see www.igb.illinois.edu.