Christopher Southan

Chris is an accomplished multidisciplinary senior scientist with an achievement record in bioinformatics, cheminformatics, proteomics, genomics, drug discovery and protein chemistry. This gives him an unusual ability to engage across, and make joins between, these domains at both the technical and strategic levels.

Having founded what is now called TW2Informatics for Drug Discovery Informatics Consulting in Göteborg he completed an extended contractfor AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal in the Knowledge Engineering Program from 2009 to 2011. This involved testing and documentation of a range of applications but focused on Chemistry Connect and PharmaConnect. Prior to this (2008/9) he coordinated the ELIXIR Database Provider Survey at the European Bioinformatics Institute. Before that he was Principle Scientist and Bioinformatics Team Leader in AstraZeneca Molecular Sciences (2004-5) supporting drug discovery projects but in 2006/7 on secondment into a cheminformatics team to exploit and document bioactive chemistry databases.

The move to Sweden was preceded by senior bioinformatics positions in Oxford Glycosciences (2002-3) and Gemini Genomics (2001) working with proteomics and clinical genomics databases respectively. The earlier role at SmithKline Beecham (1987 – 2000) was divided between a protein chemistry phase leading a team for sequencing and HPLC of target proteins, followed by a transition to full-time bioinformatics by 1996 with a focus on mining targets from EST data. Earlier academic positions and awarded degrees are listed below.

Chris has 85 publications, including 52 PubMed entries, producing an h-index of 24 and has given over 20 invited presentations in the last five years. He is also co-inventor on 22 sequence patents, mainly protease targets, 10 of which have been granted. His name is also associated with 27 UniProt entries and he has been an Honorary Professor of Proteomics at Nottingham University since 2004.