Michael Cusick Email & Phone Number

No research project in systems biology or functional genomics can operate effectively without appreciable input from Information Management. Information management encompasses Bioinformatics, and I have contributed to conventional ‘discovery’ bioinformatics, but information management can take several overlapping and ever-evolving forms.Information management can be Curation, the systematic and deliberate compilation of relevant information from the scientific literature. Almost since biocuration first reached prominence some 15 years ago I have played an instrumental part in curation efforts in both academia and industry. I participated in workshops that set standards for curation, and published analyses that first demonstrated that curation efforts can have a distressing tendency to be biased and inherently subject to considerable inconsistencies. These findings have been widely replicated, and it is now appreciated that such biases and inconsistencies have to be accounted for in any analysis that uses large-scale curated datasets. Literature Curation is also a necessity in preparation of reference sets for assessment of the accuracy and completeness of experimental datasets.Information management can be Annotation, the assignment and classification of biological entities. Annotation is tightly tied to literature curation, as the literature often supplies the information needed to classify bioentities, be those DNA sequences, constituent protein domains, or efforts to classify proteins into functional groups that have real meaning. Among my many efforts in Annotation perhaps the most far-reaching has been disease annotation, an admittedly modest but powerful classification of disease that has long proved its merit in many subsequent analyses, such as generation of a drug-target network.

Listed skills include Bioinformatics, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Systems Biology, and 10 others.