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Biosketch:
Jong Bhak is the director of PGI (Personal Genomics Institute), Korea, since 2010. He had been the director of KOBIC (Korean Bioinformation Center) since 2005. He worked on a broad range of bioinformatics problems with interests in computer hardware, operating systems, programming, and applications. He received his BSc. Honours in biochemistry from Aberdeen University in 1994 and his Ph.D. in BioInformatics from Cambridge University in 1997. He joined genetics department at Harvard Medical School in 1998 as a postdoctoral researcher for DNA chip analyses. He worked as a research fellow in EBI from 1999 until 2001. In 2001, he joined MRC-DUNN as a group leader to research geronto-genomics and mitochondrial functions. In 2003, he became an associate professor at KAIST, Korea. He is a proponent of an openfree information sharing in science. He advocates free genomics projects. His group analyzed the first Korean human genome (working with Dr. Seong-Jin Kim) and the first publically available female genome (working with Personal Genome Project). He established Genome Research Foundation jointly with Dr. Seong-Jin Kim, Dr. Byungchul Kim, and Mr. Jinup Goh, to promote the application of genomics to society. GRF, working with PGP, has launched KPGP (Korean PGP) in Korea to sequence analyze 10,000 Korean people to construct reference standard Korean genomes. Also, he is collaborating with Cha medical school, National Cancer Center, and Seoul National University to find cancer specific genomic markers using bioinformatics. |
