Barbara Eckman

Biographical Note

Barbara has been in Bioinformatics since the inception of the Human Genome Project in 1991. She was the first Bioinformatics staff member hired at the Genome Center for Chromosome 22 in Philadelphia. In 1995, she was hired to co-lead the Merck Gene Index Project at Merck Research Laboratories. The objective was to create equivalence classes of clones, each representing a distinct transcript, constructed from sequences generated by the WashU-Merck EST project. In 1997, Barbara moved to SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline). She is the Deputy Director of Bioinformatics and leads their Database Integration project. This is a research collaboration with Gene Logic, Inc. for enhancing the the Object Protocol Model (OPM) multi-database query system, a middleware system for heterogeneous distributed database integration. Barbara has a thoroughly interdisciplinary educational background, with an A.B. in Humanities from Princeton, and an M.S. in Counseling Psychology, a Ph.D. in Humanities, and an M.S.E. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Before finding a home in Bioinformatics, her publications ranged from analyses of Greek texts of the Greco-Roman period to philosophical theories of textual interpretation and post-Jungian analytical psychology.

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