Prof David Tabb, Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics, Stellenbosch University will present the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology seminar with a talk entitled, “What does this gene do?  Bioinformatics for function”

Professor David Tabb spent the first eighteen years of his life puttering with computers near Kansas City, Missouri, and then attended the University of Arkansas for his 1996 Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with a minor in Computer Science. He moved to the state of Washington and then California to complete his 2003 Ph.D. in Molecular Biotechnology with John Yates, III, at the University of Washington. He returned to the South to serve as a post-doctoral fellow for two years in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Genomes to Life program. In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School Medicine as an assistant professor. During his ten years at Vanderbilt, his team created a complete software pipeline for proteome informatics, contributing to the field-standard ProteoWizard library for mass spectrometry informatics, creating three distinct peptide identification algorithms, and developing the highly scalable IDPicker protein assembly environment. He has produced approximately 90 publications. Dr Tabb moved to Stellenbosch University in 2015 to speed the development of proteomics in South Africa and to add support to tuberculosis researchers throughout Cape Town.