Biography
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh studied theoretical biochemistry at the University of Vienna and wrote his master’s and PhD thesis at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP). After FEBS and Marie Curie fellowships at the VIB-SWITCH lab in Brussels, he has been leading the sequence analytics portfolio in the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute (BII) since 2007 and Infectious Disease Programme since 2010. He is the Executive Director of BII since January 2021. His computational team is well known for successes at the public-private interface in Singapore from Precision Medicine to Consumer Product and Food Safety and of course for his critical contributions to national and global viral pathogen surveillance through the GISAID data science initiative that has become the single most important source for virus outbreak data sharing and analysis in this pandemic powering public health responses globally. He was awarded the 2017 A*STAR STAR Award, 2017 PS(Health) Award – Excellence (Team), 2018 Ministry of Health collaborator long-service award, 2022 Public Administration Medal (Silver) under the National Awards (COVID-19) and 2024 Public Sector Transformation Award – Exemplary Leader Award.
Research Interests
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh’s research interests lie in mapping the uncharted islands in functional protein sequence space. This includes inferring functions for uncharacterised genes/proteins based on remote evolutionary relationships, prediction of the 3-dimensional structure of proteins, identification of biologically important residues and disease-related mutations, as well as developing predictors for short functional motifs in protein sequences.
Source: BII PI Webpage