Where was Nikos Kyrpides educated before Nov 1985?
Nikos Kyrpides Nikos Kyrpides ( Greek : Νίκος Κυρπίδης ) is a Greek-American bioscientist who has worked on the origins of life , information processing , bioinformatics , microbiology , metagenomics and microbiome data science . He is a senior staff scientist at the Berkeley National Laboratory , head of the Prokaryote Super Program and leads the Microbiome Data Science program at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute . Education . Kyrpides was born in Serres , Greece , where he studied biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received his PhD in molecular biology and biotechnology from the University of Crete . He pursued postdoctoral studies in microbiology with Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in bioinformatics with Ross Overbeek at the Argonne National Laboratory . From 1999 to 2004 Kyrpides worked in the biotech industry in Chicago , where he led the development of genome analysis and bioinformatics . He joined the United States Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute ( JGI ) in 2004 to lead the Genome Biology Program and develop the data management and comparative analysis platforms for microbial genomes and metagenomes . Kyrpides became the Metagenomics Program head in 2010 and founded the Prokaryotic Super Program in 2011 , which he still leads with the Microbiome Data Science Group . Research . Kyrpidess early work focused on the origins and evolution of the genetic code . In collaboration with Christos Ouzounis , he developed a series of hypotheses for the transfer of information from proteins to nucleic acids known as reverse interpretation . With the advent of genomics , Kyrpides turned his interest to the study and understanding of the last universal common ancestor . With Ouzounis he coined the acronym LUCA at a conference organized by Patrick Forterre at Les Treilles , France , and performed some of the first comparative genome analysis to predict the gene content of the LUCA . Kyrpidess work on the information processing systems revealed several previously-unsuspected relationships , suggesting new models for the evolution of those processes . He identified previously-undetected relationships between the eukaryotic and bacterial translation machinery , suggesting that the rudiments of translation initiation would have been present at the universal-ancestor stage . Kyrpidess work on the evolution of transcription helped change the understanding of the nature and organization of archaeal transcription machinery , which ( at the time ) was that transcription in Archaea was strictly similar to that in eukaryotes . Kyrpides and Ouzounis demonstrated the parallel existence of a large number of bacterial-type transcription factors in archaeal genomes . He led the development of several pioneering data-management systems in microbial genomics and metagenomics , which are widely used in the scientific community ( with several thousand users worldwide ) . These include systems for data management and curation of genome projects and their associated metadata , such as the Genomes OnLine Database ( GOLD ) , and comparative-genomics systems such as ERGO and the Integrated Microbial Genomes ( IMG ) . Kyrpidess current research focuses on microbiome research , with an emphasis on microbiome data science . This includes the understanding of structure and function of various microorganisms and microbial communities and the elucidation of the evolutionary dynamics shaping the microbial genomes . To accomplish that , his group is developing novel methods for enabling large-scale comparative analysis and mining and visualizing big data . He proposed and published the first study on the use of standard benchmarking data for the evaluation of method accuracy in metagenomics . This approach has become the standard in the field . Some of Kyrpidess recent research in microbiome data science include the exploration of Earth’s virome , the identification of new bacterial phyla the prediction of novel folds using metagenomic sequences , and the characterization of new protein families from microbiome data . International initiatives . Kyrpides began the MikroBioKosmos ( MBK ) initiative in Greece in 2007 , with the goal of exploring and commercially using microbial national resources . MikroBioKosmos became a scientific society , with Kyrpides its first president . He is a founding member of two bioinformatics societies in Greece : the Hellenic Society of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics ( HSCBB ) in 2010 and Hellenic Bioinformatics in 2016 . Kyrpides is also a board member of the international Genomic Standards Consortium ( GSC ) , which aims to enable genomic data integration , discovery and comparison with international , community-driven standards . He began the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea ( GEBA ) project at the JGI and the Microbial Earth Project with Hans-Peter Klenk , Philip Hugenholtz and Jonathan Eisen in 2007 , with the goal of improving the genome characterization of phylogenetically-diverse cultured microbes . The latter project evolved into an international effort to sequence all the type strains of bacteria and archaea , through a series of GEBA 1,000-genome projects . The rapid growth of microbial genome sequences at the end of 2010 , without a parallel venue for describing those projects in a standardized manner , led to the need for a new scientific forum which would be a clearinghouse for capturing and presenting this information to the community . This idea led Kyrpides , George Garrity and Dawn Field to launch a new scientific journal : Standards in Genomic Sciences ( SIGS ) , which became part of BioMed Central . Kyrpides proposed the development of a Microbial Environmental Genomics Administration in 2009 , analogous to NASA , for the study and exploration of the most abundant life on the planet . In 2016 , following the enormous growth of microbiome data , he outlined the need for a common infrastructure for microbiome data analysis and proposed the development of a National Microbiome Data Center ( NMDC ) , later renamed to National Microbiome Data Collaborative . With Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh , Kyrpides organized the first NMDC workshop to launch this initiative at the Joint Genome Institute . This was followed by additional workshops in 2017 hosted by the American Society for Microbiology to promote the initiative . Awards and honours . Kyrpides has received several awards , including the 2018 USFCC/J . Roger Porter Award from the American Society for Microbiology , the 2014 van Niel International Prize for Studies in Bacterial Systematics from the International Union of Microbiological Societies ( IUMS ) , a 2007 outstanding-performance award from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , and the 2012 Academic Excellence Prize from the Empirikion Foundation . He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology ( AAM ) ( 2014 ) , and has been on the Thomson Reuters list of the world’s most frequently-cited scientists since 2014 . A bacterial genus ( Kyrpidia ) was named after Kyrpides in 2011 . In 2017 , he received an honorary doctorate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki .