Paul Thomas, PhD
Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences; Director, Division of Bioinformatics; Director of the Gene Sequence, Function, and Health Laboratory Initiative
Biography
Trained in computational biology (specifically computational protein folding using statistical-mechanics based techniques with Dr. Ken Dill), Dr. Thomas turned to genomics as soon as the Human Genome Project began pilot work in 1995. The culmination of this early work was the publication of the paper describing the sequencing of the first human genome in 2001; Dr. Thomas led the work described in the 10-page section of the paper entitled \An overview of the predicted protein coding genes in the human genome.\ Since that time, Dr. Thomas's group has continued to innovate in the area of computational analysis of genomic data, with an emphasis on gene function and evolution. In addition to founding and continuing development on the PANTHER phylogenomics project, Dr. Thomas is a director of the Gene Ontology Consortium, one of the largest and best-known bioinformatics projects in the world.
Publications
PANTHER: Making genome-scale phylogenetics accessible to all.
Protein Sci. 2022 Jan;31(1):8-22. doi: 10.1002/pro.4218. Epub 2021 Nov 25. PubMed PMID: 34717010; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC8740835.
The Quest for Orthologs orthology benchmark service in 2022.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2022 May 12;. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkac330. Epub 2022 May 12. PubMed PMID: 35552456; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC9252809.
Annotation Query (AnnoQ): an integrated and interactive platform for large-scale genetic variant annotation.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2022 May 30;. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkac418. Epub 2022 May 30. PubMed PMID: 35640593; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC9252745.
Gene Ontology representation for transcription factor functions.
Biochim Biophys Acta Gene Regul Mech. 2021 Nov-Dec;1864(11-12):194752. doi: 10.1016/j.bbagrm.2021.194752. Epub 2021 Aug 28. PubMed PMID: 34461313;
PANTHER version 16: a revised family classification, tree-based classification tool, enhancer regions and extensive API.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2021 Jan 8;49(D1):D394-D403. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaa1106. PubMed PMID: 33290554; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC7778891.
Courses Taught
- Introduction to Biomedical Informatics