Academic autobiography of Don Gilbert  

My formal education is in biosciences and biostatistics, through the post-doctoral level. I worked in the public sector in the mid 1980s to learn and practice software engineering in more depth. On rejoining academia in 1988 at IU Biology department as a biocomputist / bioinformatician, I was able to fuse work in these two areas, a happy accident that put me in the middle of the growing field of bioinformatics.

I work with biologists, providing expertise in computers and bioinformatics methods, as well as develop all aspects of computing use in IU Biology department. Since its start in 1992, I've worked as a bioinformatician with the NIH funded Drosophila genome informatics project, FlyBase, co-directed by IU Biology faculty Kaufman and Matthews.

Visit our Genome Informatics Lab http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/argos/gil/

Two of my continuing research areas are developing good user interfaces to algorithms of molecular biology data analysis, and developing Internet client-server methods for usage and knowledge discovery in public bioinformatics data.

I actively write and publish software for molecular biologists to facilitate their use of the public genomic and supra-genomic data. This software often has been among the first bioinformatics works employing Internet client-server methods (SMTP, FTP, WAIS, Internet Gopher, HTTP, CORBA and Java RMI), and has enabled biologists around the world to readily use public databanks of biosequence and other data. Tens of thousands of bioscientists and students around the world have used these software and services over the past decade.

dgg pic
Don Gilbert 2009 pic
In 1989, I established the popular IUBio Archive of biology software and data. I have had collaborations with others in bioinformatics, including at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and bioinformatics members of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APBioNet of APAN).

Software I wrote in the early 1990s was the first to offer commonly needed biocomputing methods for the Macintosh computers that are widely used by bioscientists. The needs of bioscientists for humanly usable applications that incorporate new computational biology methods has been critical, and a reason why the well designed human interface of the Apple Macintosh has been popular. Though I've shifted to writing platform-independent software, this focus on usability remains.

My ReadSeq component software for biosequence data has been used widely by other bioinformaticians and biosequence software developers since its publication in 1989. Contributions outside of bioinformatics include Internet informations systems of WAIS and Internet Gopher, as well as re-usable general components in Java.

I am a proponent of the value of object oriented methods in bioinformatics, as well as production, use and re-use of free, open source software. I published one of the first Java applets used in the field, shortly after the public release of Java by Sun Microsystems. I continue actively in developing bioinformatics software in Java, as well as other languages.

Don Gilbert gilbertd@bio.indiana.edu
updated November 2002

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Ongoing and new bioinformatics projects

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