Burkhard Rost

Areas of Specialization: Computational Biology, Bioinformatics
Burkhard Rost is head of the Department of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics for the Technical University of Munich. He is also the chair of the Study Section Bioinformatics Munich with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied physics at the University of Giessen and physics, history, philosophy, and psychology at the Heidelberg University, where he earned his PhD.

Rost has focused on the use of machine learning to predict enzymatic activity, subcellular localization, functional effects of points mutations/SNPs, disordered regions, internal residue-residue contacts, and protein clustering.

He is currently trying to solve the problem of how to predict the effects of individual mutations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms. His group, Predictprotein, launched in 1992 and still releases helpful computational and machine learning models for other scientists to use in their research efforts.

He became the president of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2007, serving in that role until 2014. He has also provided conference leadership, co-chairing the annual meeting for the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, as well as conferences for that organization, held in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, China, Malaysia, Mali, Tunisia, and more. He became a Fellow of the ISCB in 2015, a position he still holds today.

Academic Website

Professional Website

Featured in Top Influential Biologists Today