Rawlings, Chris: transcript of an audio interview (04-Aug-2016)

Abstract

Interview with Professor Chris Rawlings, conducted by Professor Tilli Tansey, for the History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group, 04 August 2016, in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. Transcribed by Mrs Debra Gee, and edited by Professor Tilli Tansey and Mrs Sarah Beanland. The project management and technical support were undertaken by Mr Adam Wilkinson and Mr Alan Yabsley, respectively. Professor Chris Rawlings PhD (b. 1954) started his bioinformatics career at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1982 during which time he was the Project Manager for the computing infrastructure needed for the Human Gene Mapping Workshops (10.5 and 11). From 1991 to 1996, he led a group that researched the application of advanced logic languages to genetic mapping and protein structure bioinformatics. In 1996 he moved to SmithKline Beecham, where he was responsible for the bioinformatics platforms supporting human genetics, comparative genomics, and gene expression. From 2000 to 2004, he was the Director of Bioinformatics at Oxagen Ltd, where his group worked on the identification and validation of genes and drug targets from human genetics and genomics technologies. He moved to Rothamsted Research in 2004, where he now leads the Department of Computational and Systems Biology, which comprises over 40 staff and students engaged in research into, and application of, bioinformatics, mathematical modelling, and statistics to problems from the agricultural sciences. His personal research interests are in the development and use of data integration systems for supporting systems biology and for candidate gene discovery from multi-omics datasets. He is a visiting Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and was also one of the founding members and former Vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology.