Pataki Announces Recruitment of World-Renowned Scientist as Director of Bioinformatics Center

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Jeffrey Skolnick, Ph.D., a world-renowned scientist in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics, has been named director of the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.

A pioneer in the field of bioinformatics for his research in computational biology, Skolnick is director of computational and structural genomics at the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. His appointment is effective Sept. 30.

The recruitment of Skolnick was announced today by Gov. George E. Pataki at the University at Buffalo, which is the lead research partner in the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, during the Industry University Day 2002 luncheon at which the governor received an "Igniting Ideas Award" for his leadership in establishing the center.

Predicting that the center "will deliver tremendous benefits for the Western New York economy," Pataki, in accepting the award, added: "I applaud the federal, state and local officials who are working so closely together -- in a spirit of non-partisan cooperation -- to ensure its success."

Pataki proposed the center in his January 2001 "State of the State" address as a vehicle to create jobs and revitalize the Western New York economy. Last December, Pataki announced $50 million in state funding and more than $150 million in private sector funding for the center. The governor provided $1.9 million to help recruit Skolnick and two other researchers from the Danforth Plant Science Center.

Separate congressional appropriations garnered by Rep. Thomas Reynolds and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton totaling $3.1 million allowed an upgrade of the supercomputer at UB that will enable Skolnick to conduct his research, and which was key to his recruitment.

It also was announced today at the luncheon by UB President William R. Greiner that the John R. Oishei Foundation has awarded UB a $1,542,000 three-year grant to help support the salaries of Skolnick and two key researchers -- Andrzej A. Kolinski and Marcos R. Betancourt -- who will be coming to UB with Skolnick.

"Thanks to the generosity of the John R. Oishei Foundation, in addition to Governor George E. Pataki's strong and visionary financial commitment to this initiative and, at the federal level, the efforts of Congressman Tom Reynolds and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, we're delighted to have secured the talents of Jeffrey Skolnick and the world-class team he has assembled for our Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics," Greiner said. "This combined support made it possible for us to go after the best of the best."

Greiner added, "With Dr. Skolnick's leadership, and the research skills and strengths of Professors Kolinski and Betancourt, we're confident the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics will fulfill all its promise as a regional, state and national locus for cutting-edge bioinformatics research and opportunities for new economic development.

"The overall commitment to this initiative -- and by extension, to our region as well as to UB -- has been truly outstanding, and we are very grateful to all our supporters."

UB Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi praised Skolnick as "a unique combination of terrific scientific talent and entrepreneurial ability in the new field of bioinformatics.

"Researchers in this field are scarce, because it is a new field, and researchers of Dr. Skolnick's abilities who also possess business skills are even rarer," Capaldi added. "We were only able to recruit Dr. Skolnick because of the funding provided by the governor, Congressman Reynolds and Senator Clinton, and the extraordinary leadership gift for a local foundation from the John R. Oishei Foundation. We are extremely grateful to them for making this crucial hire possible."

Thomas E. Baker, executive director for the John R. Oishei Foundation, said its multi-year grant is designated solely for salaries because "it's critical to have the right people in charge."

He added that Skolnick "possesses the vision, experience and leadership skills necessary to successfully blend opportunities for economic development with cutting-edge scientific research. We welcome the chance to provide these start-up funds, assisting the university and its research partners as they bring the emerging field of bioinformatics to this region."

The Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics will merge high-end technology, including supercomputing and visualization, with expertise in genomics, proteomics and bioimaging to foster advances in science and health care. An emerging discipline, bioinformatics uses the power of supercomputers to interpret data in the biological sciences at the molecular level.

The center is a collaborative effort involving New York State, the federal government, corporate partners and research institutions. In addition to UB, the research partners are Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

The center will be headquartered in a 150,000-square-foot multifunctional, high-tech facility to be built in the downtown Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and will house drug-design and research laboratories, high-performance computational facilities, 3-D visualization capabilities, product commercialization space and workforce training facilities.

The Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics is an integral part of Pataki's plan to develop centers of excellence across the state to harness the strengths of universities and the private sector to create strategically targeted high-technology centers of innovation all aimed at spurring economic development and creating jobs. The Buffalo center is one of four in the state.

Skolnick has served since 1999 as director of computational and structural genomics at the Danforth Plant Science Center, a not-for-profit, basic research institution devoted to the creation of knowledge that will lead to the sustainable production of nutritious and abundant food for the peoples of the world. An adjunct professor of biochemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, he has been a member of that faculty since 1982.

Skolnick has developed algorithms for the prediction of protein structure and folding pathways from protein sequence, and pioneered the use of lattice-based approaches to protein tertiary structure prediction, as well as the simulation of membranes and membrane peptides.

In addition, he has developed structure-based approaches to predict protein function from amino acid sequence, protein-protein interactions and pathways that can be applied to entire genomes.

He holds nearly $700,000 in grant support from research organizations that include the National Institutes of Health.

Skolnick is chair of the Scientific Advisory Board on Geneformatics and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Proteome Society and the NIH Molecular and Cellular Biophysics (BBCA) Study Section.

He has served as chair of the advisory boards on NIH research resources at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as an advisory board member of the NIH Parallel Processing Resource for Biomedical Scientists at the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University and the NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Skolnick also has served as a member of numerous NIH special study sections.

Skolnick is a member of the editorial boards of Biopolymers and Applied Genomics and Proteomics, and also has served on the editorial boards of Proteins, Biophysical Journal and Journal of Chemical Physics. He serves as a referee for professional journals that include Nature, International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, Journal of Molecular Evolution, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Science.

He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society and the Biophysical Society.

The author of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and book chapters, Skolnick's publications have appeared in International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics, Journal of Computational Biology and Protein Engineering, among others.

He has presented more than 100 invited talks at national and international meetings, including the Summer School of Parallel Computing in Biomolecular Simulations in Gdansk, Poland; the International Workshop on Protein Folding and Design in Trieste, Italy; the annual meeting of the Society of Molecular Biology of Japan; the International Meeting on Sequence Structure and Function of Membrane Proteins, and the International Workshop on Methods for Macromolecular Modeling.

Skolnick holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis, and master's and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Yale University. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Bell Laboratories from 1978-79 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow from 1983-87.

Kolinski is a professor at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, and heads the biopolymers laboratory at the University of Warsaw in Poland. He earned his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Warsaw in 1979, and has taught there and at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as working at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Kolinski has authored or co-authored dozens of journal articles, won numerous grants and earned several honors including the Swietoslawski Award in 1994 and an International Scholar's Award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1995. His appointment is effective Sept. 30

Betancourt earned his doctorate in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 1995. He currently works in the computational genomics laboratory at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Prior to that, Betancourt worked at the University of Maryland and UC-San Diego. His honors include the Enrico Fermi Award in 1986, a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship in 1989 and a National Science Foundation Fellowship in 1996 and 1998. His appointment is effective Aug. 1.

The John R. Oishei Foundation, a major supporter of UB and its community-focused activities, has given or pledged more than $7.4 million to The Campaign for UB for programs ranging from the Toshiba Stroke Research Center to the Department of Family Medicine's Community Health Network of Western New York to the UB Institute for Nonprofit Agencies.

The John R. Oishei Foundation is committed to enhancing the quality of life for Buffalo area residents by supporting medical research, health care, education and the cultural, social, civic and other charitable needs of the community. The Foundation was established in 1940 by John R. Oishei, founder of Trico Product Corp., one of the world's leading manufacturers of windshield wiper systems.