Leading Bioinformatics Researcher a Convert to Life in Scotland
10 January 05
Dundee University was named recently as one of the best places for scientific researchers to live and work. Professor Geoff Barton – who moved to the city in 2001 from the south of England – agrees.
Geoff, aged 44, had established a reputation as a leading researcher in the ground-breaking field of bioinformatics at leading universities in England. Although he knew very little about living in Scotland, he was aware of the country’s impressive and growing reputation in his field.
"Once people come here (Dundee) they see it differently. If they are from the South East they tend to think Scotland is just too cold. If they visit us their perceptions change. The quality of life here is very good in terms of property, access to the countryside, an airport which connects to London, and so on. They are attracted by our level of activity and resources."
He gained his first degree in biochemistry at Manchester University, before completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. He carried out Royal Society funded research at Oxford, before moving to the European Bioinformatics Institute at Cambridge, where he built a research group from three people to 25 before deciding to head for Dundee in 2001.
At Dundee, Geoff has established The Computational Biology Group a growing research centre within the university’s School of Life Sciences, based at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre.
He says jokingly that he is a "convert" to life north of the Border – so much so that he has set up a website to demonstrate to friends and family back home that the weather in the Scottish city is much better than they seem to believe!
Geoff’s team’s core research goal is to develop effective methods to predict protein structure and function from the amino acid sequence. Current research includes the development of new techniques for protein sequence searching, new sequence alignment statistics, protein modelling methods, and the analysis – or data mining – of public information from major genome sequencing, structural genomics, and other consortia.
Why did you choose Dundee?
Geoff: "The job I was doing previously was both research and organisational. I wanted to concentrate on research only, so that was the first attraction. The research environment here is very good, with excellent colleagues like nowhere else I had been before.
"I knew about Dundee because I had published a paper with someone who works here. I had never been to Dundee before. I was attracted by the environment and the possibilities of the job. I had my wife and three boys still in primary school to think about, and we had no Scottish connections at all. But we have never regretted the decision to move."
What is at the core of your research work?
Geoff: "Molecular biology produces vast amounts of data. The best example is the human genome DNA sequence which is 3 billion letters long. If you printed it off on A4 sheets it would be as high as a 4 storey building.
"So you cannot deal with that in paper, you need computers to try to understand the data. You don’t just have the human genome, you have many other species. There is also the experimental data related to that sequence. All of this generates a lot of information which we must sort, organise and develop techniques to understand it.
"One example is the study of African Sleeping Sickness, which kills 300,000 people a year. One thing we can do is compare the complete genome sequence to human so that you can target drugs or different therapies. The aim is to can create a drug which kills the problem but not the human host.
How has the operation grown since 2001?
Geoff: "I started on my own, and we now have 16 people. We have done this through external grants and attracting good PhDs, from as varied sources as Spain, England and locally in Dundee.
"Aberdeen and Edinburgh have long been working in sequence analysis. Since I arrived as the new chair of bioinformatics at Dundee, Glasgow has done the same. We collaborate, for example the Scottish Bioinformatics Forum, which has brought together everyone involved in this area of research. There is also the Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network (SBRN) which has funding from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) and Scottish Enterprise. We want to continue to improve the infrastructure within the universities and further build on Scotland’s strengths in bioinformatics.
Where do you recruit researchers?
Geoff: "As a group we are fairly well known nationally and internationally. People hear about us and want to find out more. The appointments of the last six months came because they had approached me previously with an interest in this type of work.
"Once people come here they see it differently. If they are from the South East they tend to think Scotland is just too cold. If they visit us their perceptions change. The quality of life here is very good in terms of property, access to the countryside, an airport which connects to London, and so on. They are attracted by our level of activity and resources.
You obviously enjoy life in Scotland, has that surprised you?
Geoff: "I was ignorant of Scotland before I came here. After I had been here about six months and went back to a meeting in London, listening to people’s impressions of Scotland seemed funny. Some think there are midges everywhere and it is cold and dark, and yet Dundee is the second sunniest city in Britain.
"People in my area of work know Dundee and Scotland’s reputation for good research. I can walk from my home to the airport, and be in central London in three hours. Communications are very good and Dundee has a beautiful location in its favour.
How well did your family settle in Scotland?
"We have three children, two of whom were at primary school when we moved to Dundee. We paid a lot of attention to schooling, as it’s an important part of helping children to settle in quickly. We found an excellent local school, in walking distance from home and the university, and the three boys – now aged 11, 10 and six – are rapidly becoming adopted Dundonians."
More information
Bioinformatics in Scotland
Scientists Rank Dundee as best Scientific Institution in Europe
For more information on Geoff's bioinformatics department at University of Dundee visit:
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