Geoffrey J. Barton

Geoffrey John Barton (born 1 November 1960) is a computational biologist and Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in the UK where he is Head of the Division of Computational Biology in the School of Life Sciences. He is known for his research in computational biology, particularly in the analysis of protein sequences and structures, and for the development of widely used bioinformatics software Jalview. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy.

Education Barton was educated at Challney High School and Luton Sixth Form College. In 1980 he attended the University of Manchester where he passed the first year of a BSc Honours in Mechanical Engineering before completing a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry (1984). His final year research project "A Computer programme to aid DNA Sequencing and sequence analysis" tackled the assembly problem for Sanger sequencing on hand read gels. His doctoral thesis in protein structure prediction was supervised by Michael Sternberg at Birkbeck, University of London.

Career

After his Ph.D., Barton was awarded an Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Research Fellowship to continue research on protein structure prediction in the Biomedical Computing Unit at the ICRF Laboratories in London. He was then awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1989 to establish his group at the University of Oxford where in 1995 he became head of Genome Informatics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. He developed methods for protein multiple sequence alignment, and was an early advocate of benchmarks to assess the accuracy and biological relevance of sequence alignment methods through comparison with alignments based on three-dimensional structures. and protein ligand binding site prediction.

His group has developed widely cited software tools and techniques: Jalview (data integration and visualisation workbench on multiple sequence alignments), JPred (protein secondary structure prediction), STAMP (alignment of multiple protein three-dimensional structures), and JABAWS (remote execution of software).

Barton established the High Performance Computing facility at the University of Dundee in 2001 and the Division of Computational Biology. He is also an amateur meteorologist and has maintained the Dundee West End Weather Station since 2002. He was interviewed about the link between bioinformatics and weather forecasting by weather presenter Judith Ralston for the BBC Landward TV show and Stephen Jardine on BBC Radio Scotland.

Awards and honors

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), elected 2019 Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), elected 2011