Paul Flicek, DSc

A world leading genome data scientist, Paul Flicek, D.Sc. joined The Jackson Laboratory as its inaugural chief data science officer (CDSO) in July 2023. He first joined EMBL-EBI as a postdoc in 2005 and was appointed to the faculty in 2007, EMBL senior scientist in 2011, and associate director for EMBL-EBI Services in 2019. Most notably, his team developed the Ensembl genome annotation system and analysis infrastructure, a genome browser and annotation resource that serves tens of thousands of users daily. Flicek is also honorary professor of genomics and computational biology at the University of Cambridge.

Flicek started his career with the sequencing and analysis of the mouse genome and subsequently worked on aspects of genome annotation, comparative regulatory genomics, and large-scale biological data generation projects. He was involved with ENCODE, the 1000 Genomes Project, the International Human Epigenome Consortium, and numerous genome projects.

As one of the world’s most highly cited researchers, Flicek is a co-author of more than 280 academic publications of which more than 95 percent are open access or free to read online. He is or has been a member of the scientific advisory boards for multiple genomics companies, research institutes, international scientific projects and other organizations. Flicek has also served on UKRI and US NIH strategy panels and the supervisory board for EMBL Enterprise Ventures, EMBL's wholly owned technology transfer company. In 2020 he was recognized by his peers as both a Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology and as a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation.

Flicek completed Master of Science degrees in both biomedical engineering and computer science and a Doctor of Science in biomedical engineering focused on computational biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He graduated from Drake University with a Bachelor of Science in physics.

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