Current Synthetic and Systems Biology
Open Access

Barry Wanner

Biography

Barry Wanner is a recognized leader in bacterial physiology and bacterial molecular genetics. He studied bacterial physiology as a doctoral student under the direction of Frederick C. Neidhardt and molecular genetics as a postdoctoral fellow with Jon R. Beckwith.  He has more than thirty years experience as an independent investigator from when he joined the biology department at MIT as a research associate in 1978 to present. He joined the faculty at Emory University in 1981, and moved to Purdue University where he is a full professor in the Molecular Biosciences Cluster of the Department of Biological Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology, former ASM Foundation Lecturer, and has served on more than 25 review panels, many of which he chaired. He has done sabbatical research at Harvard Medical School with Christopher C. Walsh in 1992, John J. Mekalanosin 1998, and Stephen Lory in 2005, and has joined George M. Church’s group for collaboration in January 2012.  He was a JSPS fellow with Hirotada Mori at NAIST, Japan in 2005. He has been a vigorous proponent of collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, as documented by his co-authorships and conferences that he helped organize over the years. He has published more than 110 referred articles, including numerous highly cited one. He has an H-Index of 48, mostly for articles on which he is the first author, senior or corresponding author. He has served as Editorial Board member of the Journal of Bacteriology for eighteen years, editor of FEMS Microbiology Letters for five years, Advisory Board of Journal of Microbiology (Korea) for twelve years, Editor of Current Opinion in Microbiology, and Executive Editor of EcoSal for three years. He is co-founder of IECA (the International E. coliAlliance (C. Holden. Cell Biology: Alliance Launched to Model E. coli. Science 297 (5586):1459-1460, 2002), which has held many workshops and which will hold its fifth international conference in December 2011. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the BMC Open Source Journal Microbial Informatics and Experimentation, which was launched in 2011.

Research Interest

Research interests include bacterial physiology and bacterial molecular genetics, functional genomics tools,deep sequencing of bacterial transcriptomes,bioinformatics and database construction.