Authors

David W. Ussery has been leader of the Comparative Microbial Genomics group since 1998, at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, which is in the Department of Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark. He grew up in Springdale, Arkansas, USA, and graduated with a B.A. in Chemistry, at William Jewell College, in Liberty, Missouri, USA. He then went to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, for his M.Sci. in biophysical chemistry. Dave got his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in early 1993. He did his post-doctoral research at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford University, in England. He spent one year as a visiting scientist at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science, in Oslo, Norway, and spent one year teaching biology at Roanoke College, in Salem, Virginia, before moving to Denmark.

Trudy M. Wassenaar is of Dutch nationality, grew up in the Netherlands and did her B.Sc. in Wales, UK in Biochemistry (1984). Until 1989 she worked on molecular biology of yeast at the University of Amsterdam (NL) and then she did her PhD at the University of Utrecht (NL) in Veterinary Medicine from 1989 – 1993. She worked as a post-doc researcher at the University of Mainz, Germany, Department of Medical Microbiology from 1993-1998. In 1998 she started doing free-lance work which amounted in 1999 to the formation of a new company, Molecular Microbiology and Genomics Consultants (MMGC). From 1998 till present on she is curator of the Virtual Museum of Bacteria. From 2005 till present she is associate professor (on part-time basis) in comparative bacterial genomics at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Danish Technical University, Lyngby, Denmark. Trudy lives with her husband and their two children in Germany.

Stefano Borini is of Italian nationality. He got his Ph.D. in quantum chemistry at Ferrara University, Italy and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. He has both academic and industrial experience, focusing on scientific software development for chemistry, nanotechnology and bioinformatics. He is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where he works on chemical databases and molecular descriptors. He is the developer of utilities for quantum chemistry, like Q5Cost, theochempy, KMonodim, and other utilities and libraries like Chestnut Package Manager.