A native of Chile, Dr. Julio E. Celis received his bachelors degree from the University of Chile in 1964, and then completed his Ph.D. in the United States at the University of Iowa. After his postdoctoral training at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, he went on to become an assistant professor at the University of Chile. Dr. Celis was named an associate professor in 1975 at Aarhus University, Denmark, and in 1987 became Chairman of the Universitys Institute of Medical Biochemistry. He is also the Chairman of the Danish Centre for Human Genome Research and was recently elected Secretary General-elect of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) 1997. With nearly 180 publications to his credit, Dr. Celis specialized areas of research include molecular mechanisms of cancer, human 2D gel protein databases and their link to genome data, signal transduction, and the biology of human skin.Married, with three children and one cat (Max William), Dr. Celis currently resides in Denmark where he holds among his many titles the chair to the Symposium and Prize Committee of the Danish Cancer Society, as well as the acting Chairman of the Nordic Molecular Biology Association (NOMBA). Dr. Celis is currently the Vice President of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Council and leader of the Danish Delegation to the OECD Megascience Forum subgroup on Bioinformatics. He is also the European Union Observer to the International Nucleotide sequence database collaboration and a member of the EMBO Course Committee. Nigel Carter is the Head of Molecular Cytogenetics at the Sanger Centre, Cambridge UK and is currently the Secretary of the International Society for Analytical Cytology. Receiving his BA and D.Phil degrees from the University of York where he specialised in parasitology, Nigel became interested in flow cytometry when he was appointed to the Nuffield Department of Surgery at the University of Oxford in 1981. In 1989, Nigel took up a post in the Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge to use molecular cytogenetic technologies to study human karyotype abnormalities. Nigel's work in this field has involved the application of digital microscopy to fluorescence in situ hybridisation and the development of flow cytometry for chromosome sorting for the generation of chromosome-specific DNA libraries and paints. J. Victor Small received a Ph.D. in 1969 at Kings College, London from where he moved to Denmark to take up a lectureship at Aarhus University, which he held until 1977. Thereafter, he became department head in a new institute, the Institute of Molecular Biology, established by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Salzburg, of which he is the current director. His work has centered on smooth muscle biochemistry and structure and on the mechanism of cell motility. Tony Hunter received his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Cambridge, England. He joined the Salk Institute in 1975 as an assistant professor and has been a professor since 1982. His current interests are the protein-tyrosine kinases of the Src and growth factor receptor families and the protein-tyrosine phosphatases that remove the phosphates added by protein-tyrosine kinases. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1987, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and as an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1992. David Shotton, since 1981 a University Lecturer in Cell Biology at the University of Oxford, graduated in biochemistry from Cambridge University in 1965. During his doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge (1965-1969), he completed the sequence and crystallographic structure determination of the enzyme elastase. Following postdoctoral studies at the University of Bristol, Berkeley, and Harvard, during which he changed fields to cell biology, studying membrane structure, he took a lectureship at Imperial College in 1976. His current interests include cellular immunology, advanced light and electron microscopy techniques, digital image processing, and hypermedia.
