Francisco M. De La Vega is Principal Research Fellow in Computational Genetics at Life Technologies in Foster City, California. He earned his Doctor of Science degree in Genetics and Molecular Biology at CINVESTAV (Mexico City), where he later was appointed assistant professor and headed the Department of Genetics Bioinformatics Unit. He joined Applied Biosystems in 1997 to lead the development of bioinformatics probe design pipelines for gene expression microarray and real time PCR genomic assays products for gene expression and genotyping, and later created the SNPbrowser™ Software, a tool to select SNPs and assays for genetic association studies. Francisco led the design and analysis of a pioneering project that genotyped over 200,000 SNPs in four human populations to develop validated genotyping assays and survey the patterns of genetic variation along the genome. In collaboration with the University of Kiel, participated in the discovery of a gene of Crohn disease by a novel approach, for which he was co-recipient of the 2008 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award in Basic Research. More recently, he managed the development of bioinformatics analysis tools for the SOLiD™ System, a second-generation massively parallel sequencing platform, and currently is working on the applications of high-throughput sequencing technologies in human genetics, cancer research, and genomic medicine. Francisco represents Life Technologies at the 1000 Genomes Project steering committee.
