VBI's Pedro Mendes accepts new post in United Kingdom
Pedro Mendes, associate professor at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, will become chair of Computational Systems Biology at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, England, and will conduct research at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB).
His new appointment, effective April 1, will foster the development of research and training collaborations between the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) in the United States and the MIB in Europe.
Through a joint appointment, Mendes will continue to work on all of his current research areas at VBI as well as projects planned for the future. His ongoing work at VBI will include research group projects that have already been established, including COPASI, a major software package that allows users to model, simulate and analyze biochemical and systems biology networks.
“We are excited that Dr. Mendes will continue his research at VBI. This joint appointment provides an exciting opportunity to expand further our relationships and efforts in Europe. Manchester is one of the ideal places in which to do this since we have already been collaborating with Dr. Goble at the School of Computer Science on Cyberinfrastructure projects,” said VBI Executive and Scientific Director Bruno Sobral. “Dr. Mendes has been a major contributor to VBI’s development and his commitment to the Institute continues unchanged. He will lead the development of research and training collaborations between MIB and VBI.”
The Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, like VBI, is an institute that serves as a research component for a university community. Part of the University of Manchester, the institute has been designed to enable its academic community to explore specific areas of transdisciplinary quantitative bioscience at the highest level, largely through the efforts of transdisciplinary research teams.
Mendes’ new position at Manchester will also bring him closer to his home country of Portugal.
The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech has a research platform centered on understanding the “disease triangle” of host-pathogen-environment interactions in plants, humans and other animals. By successfully channeling innovation into transdisciplinary approaches that combine information technology and biology, researchers at VBI are addressing some of today’s key challenges in the biomedical, environmental and plant sciences.
