Gustavo Caetano-Anollés University of Illinois, USA

Dr Gustavo Caetano-Anollés is a Professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. He is an Affiliate of the Institute of Genomic Biology at the university. Previously he was Chief Scientific Officer at Vital NRG and a consultant for Ohio State University, Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, Venture Alliance, and the University of Tennessee Research Corporation.

Dr Caetano-Anollés has an MSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Biochemical Sciences from the National University of La Plata, Argentina. He went on to become a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Ohio State University and the University of Tennessee, and was later promoted to Research Assistant Professor. After that Dr Caetano-Anollés became an Associate Professor at the University of Oslo and the Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Evolution in the Molecular Biology Division. He then returned to the University of Illinois where he has taken on a variety of roles. He has also been associated with the instructional and research programs of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna since 1995.

Dr Caetano-Anollés has recently been awarded the E. Zuckerkandl Prize by Springer Verlag and the International Society of Molecular Evolution in 2003, and the International Scientist of the Year by the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, in 2006. He co-authored the book “DNA Markers: Protocols, Applications and Overviews” (1997) and edited “Evolutionary Genomics and Systems Biology” (in press). He has contributed to 29 other books, published over 90 articles and contributed to over 100 conference proceedings and abstracts on molecular biology. His current research interests are at the crossroads of structural biology and evolutionary genomics.