UAF Boasts Five President's Professors

Submitted by Carla Browning
Phone: (907) 474-7778
02/04/03

Thomas Marr, professor of bioinformatics and computational biology, is now the fifth President’s Professor appointed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marr is currently chairman of the Informatics committee for the International Human Genome Diversity Project.

UAF’s bioinformatics program will focus on the science of managing and interpreting vast amounts of data on gene expression and protein synthesis as well as complex ecological data. It will involve faculty, staff and students in the Institutes of Arctic Biology and Marine Science, Departments of Biology and Wildlife and Mathematical Sciences, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center and the graduate program in biochemistry and molecular biology.

"With Tom Marr’s leadership, we anticipate the development of new programs in graduate and undergraduate teaching and interdisciplinary research including the genetics of Alaska Native health," said Brian Barnes, director of UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology. "UAF’s strengths in research related to the circumpolar North, coupled with cutting-edge developments in bioinformatics and the resources of the supercomputing center, place UAF in a rather unique position to be competitive in bioinformatics emphasizing biological issues in northern environments."

In 1997, Marr founded the genetics software company, Genomica Corp., in Boulder, Colo. where he remained as president and chief scientist until 2001. From 1989-1997, Marr was a senior investigator at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, working on computational approaches to sequence analysis and genome mapping. Early in the development of GenBank, the National Institute of Health’s genetic sequence database, he was a staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During that time he helped to expand the annotated database of nucleotide sequences and the accompanying analytical tools.

From 1998-2002, Marr was an adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His recent research focuses on the genetics of bipolar affective disorder in humans.

Marr joins President’s Professors Keith James in Alaska Native psychology, John Walsh in global climate change, Gordon Kruse in fisheries and oceanography and Buck Sharpton in remote sensing.

"We are pleased that President Hamilton has chosen to fund positions in these areas identified in our academic development plan as ripe for development and as world-class programs of distinction," said UAF Provost Paul Reichardt. "These positions provide tangible proof that our plans are not just gathering dust, but are guiding our decision making."

Hamilton has proposed the President’s Professor positions support the university’s responsiveness and capacity to assist the state with its most important challenges and has set aside specific funds for up to eight senior faculty positions. Areas identified as opportunities for study include global climate change, fisheries and ocean sciences, Alaska Native languages and culture, global logistics, bioinformatics, satellite data retrieval and analysis, behavioral health sciences and educational technology.

The President’s Professors are funded through the University of Alaska Foundation with privately donated funds.

News releases are available electronically at www.uaf.edu/news.

Contact: Carla Browning, UAF Public Information Officer, at (907) 474-7778, or e-mail carla.browning@uaf.edu.