Geoff Barton (scientist)
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1 November 1960
Geoff Barton FRSE, FRSB | |
|---|---|
 Barton outside the Discovery Centre, University of Dundee, July 2025 | |
| Born | Geoffrey John Barton 1 November 1960 |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom/Australia |
| Education | |
| Known for | Sequence alignment software, Protein structure prediction, Jalview, JPred |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Computer analysis of protein sequence and structure (1987) |
| Doctoral advisor | Michael Sternberg |
| Website | www |
Geoffrey ''Geoff'' 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.[1][2] 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.
Barton was educated at Challney High School and Luton Sixth Form College.[citation needed] 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).[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] His doctoral thesis in protein structure prediction was supervised by Michael Sternberg at Birkbeck, University of London.[3]
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.[4] 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.[4] Barton moved in 1997 to be a Research Team Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute Cambridge and Head of the Protein Data Bank in Europe[4] before relocating to the University of Dundee in 2001 as Professor of Bioinformatics in the School of Life Sciences. He was initially co-director of the Post-Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre before becoming Founding Head of the Interdisciplinary Research Division of Computational Biology in 2013.[1]
