Christophe Dessimoz

Dessimoz obtained his Master of Science degree in 2003^[5] and PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from ETH Zurich in Switzerland^[9] where his doctoral research was supervised by Gaston Gonnet^[4] and examined by Amos Bairoch.^[9]

After postdoctoral research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire,^[10] he joined University College London (UCL) as lecturer in 2013, and was promoted to Reader in 2015.^[5] In 2015, he joined the University of Lausanne as professor, retaining an appointment at UCL.^[11] Since 2016, Dessimoz has served as group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics^[5] where his research interests are in bioinformatics, genomics, phylogenetics, evolution and computational biology.^{[3][12][13][14][15]}

Dessimoz is known for his management of the Orthologous MAtrix (OMA)^[1] which provides information on orthologous proteins. OMA has important applications in protein function prediction.^[2] Dessimoz's approach to benchmarking had a major impact on three key subfields of computational biology: orthology inference, sequence alignment, and the gene ontology (GO).^[2][16][17]

Dessimoz was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to computational biology.^[2]