Professor Pierre Baldi
University of California Irvine, USA

Short Bio:
Pierre Baldi is Chancellor’s Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences and 
the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine and the Director 
of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Born and raised in Europe, he received his 
PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1986. 
He has held postdoctoral, faculty, and member of the technical staff positions at UCSD and 
Caltech, in the Division of Biology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was CEO of a startup 
company for a few years and joined UCI in 1999.  He is the recipient of the1993 Lew Allen Award 
at JPL, the Laurel Wilkening Faculty Innovation Award at UCI, and an AAAI Fellow.  Dr. Baldi's 
has published four books: 
         -Modeling the Internet and the Web-Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms, Wiley, (2003);
         -DNA Microarrays and Gene Regulation--From Experiments to Data Analysis and Modeling, 
          Cambridge University Press, (2002);
         -The Shattered Self--The End of Evolution, MIT Press, (2001);
          Bioinformatics: the Machine Learning Approach, MIT Press, Second Edition (2001).

and over 140 scientific articles. His research focuses in various areas at the intersection of 
computational and life sciences, in particular the application of AI/statistical/machine learning 
methods to problems in bio and chemical informatics. The work of his group has resulted in several 
databases, software, and web servers that are widely used (www.igb.uci.edu/servers/servers.html).  
His main contributions include the development of Hidden Markov Models (HMMPro) for sequence 
analysis, recursive neural networks for de novo protein structure prediction (SCRATCH), Bayesian 
statistical methods for DNA microarray analysis (Cyber-T), informatics infrastructure for systems 
biology (SIGMOID) and, more recently, databases and tools in chemical informatics (ChemDB/ReactDB) 
for the prediction of molecular properties and applications in chemical synthesis, discovery, and 
drug design.