Christos Ouzounis


Christos A. Ouzounis is a computational biologist and a director of research at the CERTH in Thessaloniki.

Education

Ouzounis received his undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1987. He then received an M.Sc. in Biological Computation from the University of York in 1988 and went on to perform doctoral work with Chris Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany receiving his PhD from the University of York in 1993.

Career and research

After his PhD, Ouzounis was a Human Frontiers Science Program Postdoctoral fellow at SRI International, Menlo Park, California. Ouzounis started his own laboratory, researching computational genomics, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute in 1996.
Ouzounis moved his laboratory in 2007 to King's College London, as a Professor, Chair and Director of the KCL Centre for Bioinformatics. Following the restructuring at King's in 2009/2010, he decided to return to Greece, joining CPERI at CERTH in Thessaloniki. His research interests include genome structure, function and evolution, evolution of protein function, evolution of genetic information-processing systems, theory and applications of biological sequence comparison, data and knowledge representation for genomics, unsupervised machine learning in very large datasets, biologically-inspired hardware & software engineering, synthetic biology, exobiology, and science communication.
Some of his best known contributions in the field of computational genomics include automated sequence annotation, the discovery of genomic context methods, the inference of metabolic pathways from genome sequences, the development of methods for large-scale clustering of sequence similarities, the definition of the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and the quantification of horizontal gene transfer patterns across the "net of life". He also maintains a strong interest in the development of computational biology as an exemplary paradigm in the history of contemporary science.
His former PhD students include David Kreil, Anton Enright JM Peregrin-Alvarez, Victor Kunin Nikos Darzentas and Ignat Drozdov.

Awards and honours

Ouzounis is associate editor for the journal PLOS Computational Biology. He is also an associate editor for the journal BioSystems and Honorary Editor for the journal Bioinformatics. He is a founding officer of the International Society for Computational Biology, the Mikrobiokosmos initiative, the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics and Hellenic Bioinformatics. Ouzounis was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto.