Prof. Sean Mooney, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics.

Using computers to enable next generation biomedical research
Lab contact: smooney@buckinstitute.org, 415-209-2038

With the rise of high throughput experimentation in biotechnology, the need for new computational approaches has risen dramatically.  Dr. Sean Mooney has a long history in managing the development of collaborative electronic systems supporting biomedical research and using these systems to develop new testable biological hypotheses. His research interests focus on understanding the underlying molecular causes of inherited genetic diseases and cancer.  His laboratory is typically a mix of scientists and engineers who work together synergistically to construct new algorithms and apply them collaboratively with other scientists to generate new scientific hypotheses. 

Before moving to the Buck Institute, he was an Assistant Professor in Medical and Molecular Genetics, where he received tenure. He was founding director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core.  In 1997, Dr. Mooney received his B.S. with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 under the advisement of Dr. Teri Klein at the University of California in San Francisco. In 2001, he was awarded an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellowship under the advisement of Dr. Russ Altman at Stanford University.  He is funded by the National Library of Medicine and other NIH Institutes, mostly in the area of developing computer-based systems for studying genetic disease. 

Dr. Mooney also has experience leading the construction of communities; he is co-founder of a nonprofit focusing on biomedical entrepreneurship in the SF Bay Area, BioE2E (http://bioe2e.org), the Indiana Biomedical Entrepreneur Network (http://www.indianabionetwork.org/), and the Bioinformatics Curriculum Collaboration. He was a member of the team that won the grand prize in the $150k 2000 Garage.com Student Business Plan Competition.   Recently, he founded the company Selican Technologies to commercialize the open source Laboratree Collaboration Platform (http://laboratree.org/).  He sits on the editorial boards of multiple journals and is the Program Chair of the Computational Systems Biology Conference (CSB) at Stanford University.