Chris Sander is a computational biologist based at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. Previously he was chair of the Computational Biology Programme at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In 2015, he moved his lab to the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and the Cell Biology Department at Harvard Medical School.

Education

Sander originally trained as a physicist receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Berlin in 1967. After a period studying at the University of California, Berkeley and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he gained his

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degree in theoretical physics from the

State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...

in 1975. His thesis was titled ''Analytic properties of bound state wave functions''.

Research

Sander credits his move from theoretical physics to computational biology to Fred Sanger's 1977 landmark paper in '' Nature'', in which the nucleotide sequence of

bacteriophage φX174 The phi X 174 (or ΦX174) bacteriophage is a single-stranded DNA ( ssDNA) virus that infects ''Escherichia coli'', and the first DNA-based genome to be sequenced. This work was completed by Fred Sanger and his team in 1977. In 1962, Walter Fier ...

was published. Sander has made many contributions to the field of

structural bioinformatics Structural bioinformatics is the branch of bioinformatics that is related to the analysis and prediction of the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules such as proteins, RNA, and DNA. It deals with generalizations about macromol ...

including developing tools such as the Families of Structurally Similar Proteins (FSSP) database and the DSSP algorithm for assigning

secondary structure Protein secondary structure is the three dimensional conformational isomerism, form of ''local segments'' of proteins. The two most common Protein structure#Secondary structure, secondary structural elements are alpha helix, alpha helices and beta ...

to the amino acids of a protein, given the atomic-resolution coordinates of that protein. Sander has also worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute, has served as chief information officer for the biopharmaceutical company Millennium Pharmaceuticals and has been an advisor to IBM's Deep Computing Initiative, which produced the

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chess computer.

Awards and honours

Sander is a former Executive Editor for the journal ''

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

''. In 2014 he was appointed one of the first Honorary Editors of ''Bioinformatics''. Sander was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award in 2010. He was awarded the 2018

DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences The DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences is a prize in the field of computational biology. It is awarded annually for "the most accessible and innovative development or application of computer technology to enhance research in the life scienc ...

Personal life

Sander is the brother of German actor Otto Sander.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sander, Chris American bioinformaticians Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Computational chemists Year of birth missing (living people) Humboldt University of Berlin alumni