Prof. CHRIS RAWLINGS

BIOGRAPHY

Chris was formerly Head of Computational and Analytical Sciences at Rothamsted Research, but is currently advising on new digital projects. He began his career at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1982 and, since then, he has published over 60 articles and edited several books on computational biology. For much of his career, he has been involved in the development and application of bioinformatics software. He moved to Rothamsted Research in 2004. More than 40 staff and students are engaged in computational and analytical sciences at the institute, researching and applying bioinformatics, statistics, and high throughput and precision analytical methods to problems from the agricultural sciences. Chris has personal research interests in the development and use of informatics methods for supporting systems biology. This research has produced open source bioinformatics software for data integration that has been used in the analysis of both crop and pathogen genomics datasets. Chris is increasingly interested in the use of informatics and data science methods in agriculture; going beyond molecular genotype to phenotypic and environmental data. Chris is a visiting professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and he was one of the founding members and former vice president of the International Society for Computational Biology.