Reece Hart has joined UC Berkeley as the Chief Scientist of the Genome Commons to lead the collaboration and oversee the operations of the project.  Reece is a Celera-TCS Innovation Fellow

Reece received his M.S. in computer science with David States in 1994 and his Ph.D. in molecular biophysics with Jay Ponder in 1998, both from Washington University in St. Louis. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Computational Biology Center at IBM’s Watson labs, where he worked on automated discovery of protein sequence motifs and their applications to function and structure prediction. In 2001, he joined Genentech as a scientist in the Bioinformatics and Protein Engineering departments where he applied structure prediction to target discovery. In 2006, he became the scientific manager of Research Computing & Informatics at Genentech. Reece designed and implemented Unison (reference), a large-scale open source project for protein annotation and mining that is similar in spirit and technical challenges to those of the Genome Commons.

We are excited and honored to have Reece working with us. The project was long on hiatus while we made this appointment and we look forward to swift progress. Watch for updates here.

We currently have a position available for the Chief Scientist of the Genome Commons.  This individual will provide day-to-day scientific leadership of the Genome Commons project including the Genome Commons database, the Curators’ Toolkit for entering information into genetic variation databases, and the Genome Commons Navigator.  The initial closing date is 1 Jan 09.  To ask questions or apply, please write jobs@compbio.berkeley.edu.

You can now give to support the Genome Commons. Donations to the Genome Commons fund at the University of California, Berkeley are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law, and will be used to support development of the Genome Commons and genome interpretation.

Given the lag between blog postings, it is evident that I am not a natural blogger. However, there has been progress in creating a demonstration prototype of the Genome Commons and Genome Commons Navigator.

I will be presenting the Genome Commons concept and giving updates on its status at a series of meetings this summer:

• The Human Variome Project Planning Meeting 27 May 2008, Costa Brava, Spain
• How to Explore Human Genotype to Phenotype Relationships, satellite to ESHG, 31 May 2008, Barcelona, Spain
• Beyond Genome, 11 June 08, San Francisco, CA, where I will be chairing the closing panel discussion
• ISMB BOF, 20 July 2008, Toronto, Canada

In addition to the formal presentations, I will offer informal walk-through demonstrations of the current preliminary prototype, in the hopes of eliciting feedback and code contributions. I look forward to stimulating conversations.

A commentary describing my thoughts for a Genome Commons and Navigator is about to be published in Nature, and additional versions of those musings and more details may be found on the about page of this site.

Since working as an undergraduate in Wally Gilbert’s genome laboratory, I looked forward to the completion of an individual’s complete genome because of the insights that it would reveal. I was thus disappointed by how little of individual significance was learned from the Venter and Watson genomes. I think that the typical potential of personal genomes to inform health has often been exaggerated. Furthermore, it is clear that we don’t yet have the scientific understanding to interpret much of the information that is present within our genomes. Nonetheless, I am also shocked by the lack of simple accessible resources to allow us to make use of our existing knowledge and to improve our understanding. I thus propose the creation of a Genome Commons.

I welcome your thoughts.