Genomatica Inc., a leading computational systems biology company, announced today that it has formed a scientific advisory board comprised of thought-leaders in the scientific community to provide independent expert opinion on the company's research and commercialization programs and to provide guidance in the areas of systems biology, computational molecular biology and genomics research. The board will initially consist of George Church, Ph.D., Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D., Eugene Myers, Ph.D. and Bernhard Palsson, Ph.D., who will serve as Chairman. "We are delighted to have scientists of Drs. Palsson, Church, Hood and Myers' stature join our Scientific Advisory Board," commented Christophe H. Schilling, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Genomatica. "They are true pioneers and visionaries of systems biology and genome enabled science, and their unique expertise in these areas will be instrumental to advancing Genomatica's position as a leader in computational systems biology. Each member, individually and collectively, will bring valuable scientific insight to Genomatica, and in doing so, will further our efforts to develop innovative products for medical and industrial biotechnology." Brief backgrounds of the members of the Scientific Advisory Board are provided below: Dr. Palsson is a Professor of BioEngineering and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD.) In addition to co-founding Genomatica, Professor Palsson has co-founded several other biotechnology companies. He is the author of 20 issued U.S. patents and over 190 peer reviewed scientific articles including a recent paper entitled "Integrating high-throughput and computational data elucidates bacterial networks" which was published in the May 6, 2004 edition of Nature magazine. Professor Palsson received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Church is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics. Professor Church's research focuses on integrating bio-systems modeling with high-throughput data for haplotypes, RNA arrays, proteomics, and metabolites. He is the author of 9 issued U.S. patents and over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles. Professor Church helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984, and later he helped found the Stanford, MIT, and Waltham Genome Centers. Professor Church received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University. Dr. Hood is Co-founder and President of the Institute for Systems Biology, and is recognized as one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. He has played a crucial role in advancing the life sciences, contributing particularly to the successful mapping of the human genome during the 1990s. Dr. Hood has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers, received 12 patents, and has co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology and genetics. Dr. Hood received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Myers is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and formerly Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996. Myers has made seminal algorithmic contributions in the areas of sequence comparison and pattern finding in bioinformatics including the development of the software tools Blast -- a widely used tool for protein similarity searches and FAKtory -- a system to support DNA sequencing projects. He is the author of 6 published U.S. patents and over 80 peer reviewed scientific articles. Professor Myers received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado.