Dr Arthur Thomas

Profile

Trained as both a biologist (at Oxford) and a computer scientist (at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab), Arthur was founder and continues as CEO of Proteus Associates, a consultancy specialising in applications of information technology to the life sciences, with clients including large pharmaceutical companies, small biotech companies, technology providers and academic institutions.

Arthur has taught computational biology in Switzerland and Semantic Web technologies in the USA. He has been involved in the founding of a half-dozen start-up companies in the USA and Europe. He was also involved in some initial experiments in Web-based distance learning at Balliol in the late 1990s.

Much of his recent work has been in the area of ‘systems biology’: the construction of predictive computational models of biological systems (ranging from the molecular to the whole-organ level) which are used in drug discovery and medicine. He has also been involved for many years in knowledge mining (extracting and managing knowledge from databases and text) and knowledge fusion (supporting complex decision making and collaboration between scientists from different domains and organisations). Much of this work has involved ontological engineering and methods for making inferences on complex knowledge domains. Most recently he has been acting as coordinator for a large e-life-science Grid project in Switzerland, and thinking about how Grid infrastructures and rapidly developing ideas about the ‘Semantic Web’ can be used to support academic / industry cooperation in drug discovery and development.

Positions held at the OII

• Research Associate, November 2006 –