Nikos Kyrpides
Nikos Kyrpides received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Crete, Greece, in 1996. His work involved transcriptional regulation and signal transduction of cytokines in human cells. He then pursued postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Microbiology. There he participated in the analysis of archaeal and bacterial genomes and the evolution of information processing systems. In 1998, he moved to the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne National Laboratory, in the group of Ross Overbeek, where he did research in genome-wide analysis of microbial organisms. In 1999, he turned to industry by joining the newly founded Integrated Genomics Inc, leading the development of its genome analysis pipeline. Following Ross Overbeek’s vision that “one thousand genomes can be analyzed more easily and more efficiently than a single one”, his group there achieved the manual curation of more than 700 genomes, leading to the development of one of the most comprehensively curated genomic systems, the ERGO system. Nikos joined JGI in 2004 to lead its Genome Biology Program. His group is primarily responsible for the analysis of microbial genomes as well as the development of novel methods and approaches for comparative analysis, including large-scale function prediction and the design of cellular and metabolic pathway collections.
