Lawrence Hunter

Professor Lawrence E. Hunter is Director of the Center for Computational Biology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.^[1] He is an internationally known scholar,^[2][3][4] focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computational biology, which led to the genesis of the major professional organization in the field and two international conferences.^[5]

Career

Hunter completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1989, Knowledge Acquisition Planning: Gaining Expertise Through Experience, on diagnosis of lung cancer from histological images using Case-based reasoning,^[6] under the guidance of Roger Schank.^[7] Faced with a choice between careers in the main applications of artificial intelligence---game programming and defense work—Hunter chose to create a new discipline, bioinformatics. From 1989 to 2000, Hunter worked as a computer scientist and section chief for National Institutes of Health sections devoted to statistical and bioinformatic research. He was an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University from 1991 through 2000 and an associate professor in the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine from 2000 to 2008. He was promoted to professor in 2008.^[8]

Organizational work

ISCB

In 1997, Hunter founded what has become the largest professional organization in computational biology and bioinformatics, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).^[9]

Conferences

Hunter was also a founder of three successful international conferences in bioinformatics, the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing^[10] and the Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference. He is also a co-organizer of the biological visualization conference Vizbi. Hunter cofounded and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Molecular Mining Corporation from 1997 to 2003. Hunter is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the winner of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence’s 2003 Engelmore Prize for Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Influence

Hunter is credited with being one of the founding fathers of bioinformatics. Throughout his career Hunter has researched and directed research groups investigating the development and application of advanced computational techniques for biomedicine to high-throughput assays, particularly the application of statistical and knowledge-based techniques to the analysis of high-throughput data and of biomedical texts. He has proposed neurobiologically and evolutionarily informed computational models of cognition, and ethical issues related to computational bioscience.

Bibliography

• Rindflesch, T.; Tanabe, L.; Weinstein, J.; Hunter, L. (2000). "EDGAR: Extraction of drugs, genes and relations from the biomedical literature". Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing: 517–528. PMC 2709525. PMID 10902199. 
• Schank, R. C.; Collins, G. C.; Hunter, L. E. (1986). "Transcending inductive category formation in learning". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 9 (4): 639. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00051578. 
• Rindflesch, T. C.; Rajan, J. V.; Hunter, L. (2000). "Extracting molecular binding relationships from biomedical text". Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing -. pp. 188–195. doi:10.3115/974147.974173. 
• Planning to learn The Proceedings of The Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Boston, MA., July 1990, pp. 26–34, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. in.^[11]
• Hunter, L.; Cohen, K. B. (2006). "Biomedical Language Processing: What's Beyond PubMed?". Molecular Cell. 21 (5): 589–594. doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2006.02.012. PMC 1702322. PMID 16507357. 
• Hunter, Lawrence (1993). Artificial intelligence and molecular biology. Menlo Park, Calif: AAAI Press. ISBN 0-262-58115-9. 
• Baumgartner, W. A.; Cohen, K. B.; Fox, L. M.; Acquaah-Mensah, G.; Hunter, L. (2007). "Manual curation is not sufficient for annotation of genomic databases". Bioinformatics. 23 (13): i41–i48. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm229. PMC 2516305. PMID 17646325. 
• Hunter, L.; Lu, Z.; Firby, J.; Baumgartner Jr, W. A.; Johnson, H. L.; Ogren, P. V.; Cohen, K. B. (2008). "OpenDMAP: An open source, ontology-driven concept analysis engine, with applications to capturing knowledge regarding protein transport, protein interactions and cell-type-specific gene expression". BMC Bioinformatics. 9: 78. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-78. PMC 2275248. PMID 18237434. 
• Leach, S. M.; Tipney, H.; Feng, W.; Baumgartner, W. A.; Kasliwal, P.; Schuyler, R. P.; Williams, T.; Spritz, R. A.; Hunter, L. (2009). Miyano, Satoru, ed. "Biomedical Discovery Acceleration, with Applications to Craniofacial Development". PLoS Computational Biology. 5 (3): e1000215. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000215. PMC 2653649. PMID 19325874. 

References