Meet the new chair of the Molecular BioSystems Editorial Board—Charles Boone

In this issue we welcome our new Editorial Board Chair, Professor Charles Boone from the University of Toronto. Charlie holds the Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto’s Banting and Best Department of Medical Research based in the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre. He is a leading member of the yeast systems biology community internationally. He has worked closely with Professor Brenda Andrews in Toronto to develop an automated approach for genetic analysis in yeast. This work has enabled the mapping of genetic networks on a large-scale and the determination of the function of all genes in a yeast model system. The function of many yeast genes is conserved in humans and this work has the potential for discovery of therapeutic drug targets. The Boone group has been involved in a range of interdisciplinary collaborative projects to study yeast functional genomics and its computational analysis.

Charlie’s postdoctoral research was in yeast genetics at the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. In 1993 he established his own research group at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, receiving the Ontario Government’s Premier's Research Excellence Award in 1999. He is also a recipient of the William E. Rawls Award for Research Excellence of the National Cancer Institute of Canada, the 2003 Merck Frosst Award of the Canadian Society of Biochemistry, and the 2006 Ira Herskowitz award at the Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology Meeting. He has received two HHMI International Research Scholar awards.

Charlie takes over as the new Chair of Molecular BioSystems from Tom Kodadek who very ably helped to steer the journal through its first 5 years. We welcome Charlie to the Board and look forward to taking full advantage of his experience and insight over the coming months.

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