Michael R. Barnes BSc, PhD

Michael holds a B.Sc. in Applied Biology and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Cardiff University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Wales, Bangor, he joined GlaxoSmithKline to lead a computational biology team focused on the use of genetic, genomic and chemogenomic approaches for drug discovery and patient stratification. At GSK he championed pre-competitive collaboration among pharma and academia and co-led an EFPIA team of pharmaceutical companies to gain €10M Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funding for the OpenPhacts project, which constructed “an open pharmacological space” - a suite of public bio- and cheminformatics resources for drug discovery. Michael now serves on the scientific advisory board of the OpenPhacts project.

Michael is also passionate about improving the translational and collaborative interface between industry and academia. After fourteen years at GSK, Michael joined the William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) in 2012 as the Director of Bioinformatics. His team now collaborate with all research areas of the WHRI and also many researchers at the Blizard Institute, bringing a focus on the application of computational biology and bioinformatics to improve translational research.