Recruitment of Director, Dr. Ilya Vakser
Document Actions
June, 2004
The University of Kansas is happy to
announce the recruitment of Dr. Ilya Vakser of SUNY Stony Brook as the Director of the
newly created Center for Bioinformatics. Dr. Vakser will assume his position on January 30, 2005.
He is an internationally recognized expert in bioinformatics and computational biology and a leader
in the field of modeling protein interactions and structural description of genomes.
Dr. Vakser earned his PhD in biophysics at Moscow State University in 1989 and received further training at the Weizmann Institute, Washington University, and the Rockefeller University. He served on the faculty of the Medical University of South Carolina as an assistant and associate professor and SUNY Stony Brook as an associate professor. Dr. Vakser will join KU as a full professor, with a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular Biosciences.
Dr. Vakser is the author of many scientific papers resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other funding agencies. He combines his research with scientific community-wide activities as an organizer of international conferences and a member of many advisory and steering committees.
The recruitment of Dr. Vakser comes at the time of the Kansas Economic Growth Act, which will allocate $500 million over the next ten years to Life Sciences research in Kansas. The KU Bioinformatics initiative under the leadership of Dr. Vakser will evolve into an interdisciplinary center, which will combine world-class research with graduate education, and become an international hub of activities in bioinformatics and computational biology.
