Biography:Manuel Corpas (scientist)

From HandWiki

Manuel Corpas is an Anglo-Spanish biologist and entrepreneur known primarily for his contributions to the field of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Currently Corpas is Chief Scientist of Cambridge startup Cambridge Precision Medicine,[1] a tutor at the Institute for Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. Manuel worked on the human genome from the beginning of his career, being one of the first consumers to sequence and his own genome and that of close relatives, which he published as the Corpasome. He has held positions at the Earlham Institute as Project Leader, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, developing the DECIPHER database, a database that aids in the diagnosis of patients with rare genomic disorders.

Education

Corpas gained his Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Navarra in 2000. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2007 by the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Terri Attwood studying the evolutionary conservation of folds in proteins.[2]

Academic service

During his PhD Corpas started the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCBSC),[3] the international organisation of computational biology students. The International Society for Computational Biology officially approved the Student Council in 2004 with Corpas as its inaugural Chair. To date the Student Council has numerous Regional Student Groups around the world touching many thousands of students in the field.[4][5] Corpas has also organised the first Student Council Symposium in Computational Biology at the European Conference in Computational Biology in Madrid (2005). Additionally, he served as the chair of the first conference of bioinformatics in Africa by the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Research and career

After a few months at the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute in Madrid under Alfonso Valencia and the European Bioinformatics Institute under Ewan Birney, Corpas settled at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute as developer of the DECIPHER database under the supervision of Dr Helen V. Firth.[6] Since then he has been working in the field of human genome research and personal genomics. During his tenure at the Wellcome Sanger Institute he initially focused on the development of integration and visualisation tools for interpretation of Copy Number Variation datasets.[7][8] A while later, he started his work in the ‘Corpasome’.[9][10][11] He was among the first people to make public on the internet his personal genotype from 23andMe and soon after his family analysed their genotypes using 23andMe data first and then human exome technology and more recently whole genome. This has led to a number of important publications in the field of personal genomics,[12] performing the first crowdsourced analysis of a family of genomes.[13] During the end of his tenure at the Sanger Institute he organised the BioJavaScript (BioJS) community to become its coordinator since 2012 until 2017. The BioJS community is the greatest effort to date in the provision of open source web components for biological visualisation. Corpas’ research group has been involved in some of the most important developments of this open software community.[14][15][16] BioJS involves efforts from world leading resources such as the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Berkeley Lab, Cambridge University and others. Corpas was successful in obtaining 5 internship for the Google Summer of Code, which catapulted BioJS as an international effort.

Corpas has also been the Technical Coordinator of ELIXIR-UK,[17] the UK branch of the ELIXIR European network for bioinformatics and data resources. During his time as ELIXIR Technical coordinator he has been involved in the development of best practices and standardised metrics to measure the impact of data resources across Europe. During this time he also was involved in the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training,[18][19] acting as the chair of their technical committee and the development of their training portal, which provides open access training resources for the bioinformatics community.

As well as his work at Cambridge Precision Medicine, Manuel is a Tutor at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and also teaches online courses in precision medicine in both English and Spanish. Manuel has over 50 peer reviewed scientific publications to his name,[20] and a book Perfect DNA,[21] in which he explores the wider issues beyond the science of genetic sequencing.

Awards and honours

Corpas is a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a frequent speaker in world renown events in genomics such as Festival of Genomics London, BioData West, the Longevity World Forum and others. He has been catalogued as one of the leading people in from Malaga (Spain) having an impact in the world.[22]

References

  1. "CPM - Homepage". https://www.cpm.onl/. 
  2. Corpas, Manuel (2007). Folding patterns in protein sequences (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.964811.v1.
  3. Corpas, Manuel (August 2005). "Scientists & societies". Nature 436 (7054): 1204. doi:10.1038/nj7054-1204b. ISSN 0028-0836. 
  4. "ISCB-SC RSGs". http://rsg.iscbsc.org. Retrieved 1 February 2017. 
  5. Macintyre, Geoff (2013). "The Regional Student Group Program of the ISCB Student Council: Stories from the Road". PLoS Computational Biology 9 (9): e1003241. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003241. PMID 24098107. 
  6. www-core (webteam). "Helen V Firth". https://www.sanger.ac.uk/people/faculty/honorary-faculty/helen-firth. 
  7. "DECIPHER: Database of Chromosomal Imbalance and Phenotype in Humans Using Ensembl Resources". Am. J. Hum. Genet. 84 (4): 524–33. April 2009. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.03.010. PMID 19344873. 
  8. Swaminathan GJ et al. (2012). "DECIPHER: web-based community resource for clinical interpretation of rare variants in developmental disorders". Hum. Mol. Genet. 21 (R1): R37–R44. doi:10.1093/hmg/dds362. PMID 22962312. 
  9. Corpas M, Cariaso M, Coletta A, Weiss D, Harrison AP, Moran F, Yang H (12 November 2013). "A Complete Public Domain Family Genomics Dataset". bioRxiv 000216 Check |biorxiv= value (help).
  10. Corpas, Manuel (2013). "Crowdsourcing the Corpasome". Source Code for Biology and Medicine 8 (1): 13. doi:10.1186/1751-0473-8-13. PMID 23799911. 
  11. "Crowdsourced direct-to-consumer genomic analysis of a family quartet". BMC Genomics 16 (910): 910. Nov 2015. doi:10.1186/s12864-015-1973-7. PMID 26547235. 
  12. "A Family Experience of Personal Genomics". Journal of Genetic Counseling 21 (3): 386–391. June 2012. doi:10.1007/s10897-011-9473-7. PMID 22223063. PMC 134180. http://www.cmaj.ca/content/167/9/1021. 
  13. "Keeping It in the family". https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/08/keeping-it-family. Retrieved 13 August 2012. 
  14. Corpas; Jimenez, Rafael; Carbon, Seth J; García, Alex; Garcia, Leyla; Goldberg, Tatyana; Gomez, John; Kalderimis, Alexis et al. (2014). "BioJS: an open source standard for biological visualisation – its status in 2014". F1000Research 3: 55. doi:10.12688/f1000research.3-55.v1. ISSN 2046-1402. PMID 25075290. 
  15. Thanki, Anil S.; Caim, Shabhonam; Corpas, Manuel; Davey, Robert P. (2014). "DNAContentViewer a BioJS component to visualise GC/AT Content". F1000Research 3: 54. doi:10.12688/f1000research.3-54.v1. ISSN 2046-1402. 
  16. Thanki, Anil S.; Jimenez, Rafael C.; Kaithakottil, Gemy G.; Corpas, Manuel; Davey, Robert P. (2014). "wigExplorer, a BioJS component to visualise wig data". F1000Research 3: 53. doi:10.12688/f1000research.3-53.v2. ISSN 2046-1402. PMID 27781080. 
  17. "ELIXIR-UK – UK life science infrastructure for biological information". https://elixiruknode.org/. 
  18. "Committees | GOBLET". http://www.mygoblet.org/committes_summarized. Retrieved 24 August 2016. 
  19. Corpas, M.; Jimenez, R. C.; Bongcam-Rudloff, E.; Budd, A.; Brazas, M. D.; Fernandes, P. L.; van Gelder, C.; Korpelainen, E. et al. (2015). "The GOBLET training portal: a global repository of bioinformatics training materials, courses and trainers". Bioinformatics 31 (1): 140–142. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu601. PMID 25189782. 
  20. "Manuel Corpas - Google Scholar Citations". https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vBV3CA0AAAAJ. 
  21. Manuel Corpas (2016). Perfect DNA. Cambridge: DNAdigest. ISBN 978-1539783725. 
  22. Hoy, Málaga (2016-04-10). "Los números 1 malagueños" (in es). https://www.malagahoy.es/malaga/numeros-malaguenos_0_1015998551.html.