Bioinformatician
Mark Dalphin received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in Biology for studies in bacteriophage. During his studies, friends asked “Is Mark a computer person working in Biology or a Biologist working with computers”? His post-doctoral work was at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, working on peptide chain release factors. To understand the recognition of the stop codon by the release factors, computational studies of their sequence specificity were begun. By the mid-1990s, he ceased working at the bench to become a full-time computational biologist.
In 1998, Mark joined the Computational Biology group at Amgen, working on gene calling in the Celera human genome. He moved into microarray analysis and on into analysis of the multiplicity of assays employed by the Amgen immunology and oncology groups. In 2008, at the invitation of a friend at the University of Otago, he took up the role of Director of Bioinformatics for a startup medical diagnostics company. There he built their bioinformatics team and helped create the algorithms for the company’s bladder cancer diagnostics.
Mark’s interests in Biology center around molecular biological regulation or, if looked at from an Oncology or Immunology perspective, dis-regulation. He continues to enjoy exploring how to further the use of computers and algorithms for the analysis of biological data.