Dr Michael Barnes

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Michael holds a B.Sc. in Applied Biology and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Cardiff University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Wales, Bangor, he joined GlaxoSmithKline to lead a computational biology team focused on the use of genetic, genomic and chemogenomic approaches for drug discovery and patient stratification. At GSK he championed pre-competitive collaboration among pharma and academia, and co-led an EFPIA team of pharmaceutical companies to gain €10M Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funding for the OpenPhacts project, which constructed “an open pharmacological space” - a suite of public bio- and cheminformatics resources for drug discovery. Michael now serves on the scientific advisory board of the OpenPhacts project. Michael is also passionate about improving the translational and collaborative interface between industry and academia. After fourteen years at GSK, Michael joined the William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) in 2012 as the Director of Bioinformatics. His team now collaborate with all research areas of the WHRI and also many researchers at the Blizard Institute, bringing a focus on the application of computational biology and bioinformatics to improve translational research.

Michael is an investigator at the London Farr Institute and also serves on the board and exec of eMedLab, a ground breaking cloud computing facility funded by the MRC. He is also a co-investigator on several stratified medicine projects, including MRC PSORT (Psoriasis), MRC RA-Map (RA), MRC MATURA (RA) and MRC Target (Giant Cell Arteritis).

The Centre for Translational Bioinformatics team are working across diverse domains, including genomics, drug discovery, stratified medicine, high performance computing and health informatics with a unified objective to drive forward translation into the clinic. He serves on the MRC Methodology Research Panel and the MRC Stratified Medicine panel and also advises on a number of project boards, including the MRC-eMedLab HPC facility, the IMI etriks project, IMI OpenPHACTS and the F1000 faculty (Bioinformatics). He has published widely and also edited the successful John Wiley Book, Bioinformatics for Geneticists. He also holds a visiting Senior Lecturer post at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London.

Group Leader at C4TB

Team members 

• Dr Adriano Barbosa
• Dr Claudia Cabrera
• Dr Chris John
• Dr Evan Tzanis
• Ms Sandra Ng
• Mr Daniel Rhodes
• Mr David Watson

Research