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Brian Foley, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA

Working at GenBank from 1984 to 1987 I became interested in retroviral oncogenes and cancer. I then got a PhD in Molecular Genetics, in part financed by a cancer biology training grant, from the University of Vermont. Although no degree in bioinformatics was offered at the time, I spent over half my time working in the computer science department and doing DNA and protein sequence analysis for fellow students and professors. After completing my PhD in 1995 I began working for the HIV Databases at LANL, where I remain to this day. My interests are primarily in the molecular epidemiology and evolution of HIV, and comparing the natural history and evolution of HIV to other viruses. I also maintain the nonhuman primate HIV/SIV vaccines database at LANL. For the past 5 years, I have also been an instructor for the international bioinformatics workshop on virus evolution and molecular epidemiology (http://regaweb.med.kuleuven.be/workshop/). Although molecular phylogenetics is remarkably accurate at reconstructing many evolutionary events, I find phylogenetic methods even more useful for detecting selection pressures, which drive evolution away from a pattern of random change over time.

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