Alvis Brazma's Biography

Alvis Brazma, Senior Team Leader of Functional Genomics, European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Dr Alvis Brazma studied mathematics at the University of Latvia, Riga, before obtaining his PhD in computer science from the Moscow State University. His doctoral work concerned automatic learning of algorism form sequences of actions. After postdoctoral work at the New Mexico State University, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Latvia and was a visiting Researcher at Helsinki University, where his interests switched to bioinformatics. In 1997 he joined the European Bioinformatics Institute and was among the first scientists to use microarray data to study gene regulation. In 1999 he founded the Microarray Gene Expression Data society and raised funding to start a microarray database at EBI – ArrayExpress, which is now one of the major international repositories for functional genomics data. Now he is overseeing the development and services for several major EBI resources, including ArrayExpress, Expression Atlas, and BioSamples database. His main research interests concern integrative data analysis to reveal patterns of gene and protein expression in normal and diseased state. He has over hundred scientific publications and is a Principal Investigator on several large collaborative genomics and biomedical projects, including the kidney cancer project of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.