Dr. Kyrpides joined the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2004 to lead the Genome Biology Program and the development of the data management and comparative analysis platforms for microbial genomes and metagenomes (IMG). He became the Metagenomics Program head in 2010 and leads the Prokaryotic Super Program and the Microbiome Data Science Group since 2011. Prior to joining the DOE Joint Genome Institute, Dr. Kyrpides led the development of the genome analysis and Bioinformatics core at Integrated Genomics Inc. in Chicago, IL. He did his postdoctoral studies with Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and with Ross Overbeek at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Dr. Kyrpides joined the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2004 to lead the Genome Biology Program and the development of the data management and comparative analysis platforms for microbial genomes and metagenomes (IMG). He became the Metagenomics Program head in 2010 and leads the Prokaryotic Super Program and the Microbiome Data Science Group since 2011. Prior to joining the DOE Joint Genome Institute, Dr. Kyrpides led the development of the genome analysis and Bioinformatics core at Integrated Genomics Inc. in Chicago, IL. He did his postdoctoral studies with Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and with Ross Overbeek at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa. All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. He is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups, whose objective was to commercialize these prototypes.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the prestigious ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and has been recognized by Computer Reseller News as one of the top five software developers of the century. Moreover, Forbes magazine named him one of the 8 innovators driving the Silicon Valley wealth explosion during their 80th anniversary edition in 1998. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T.