David Galas has had a mix of experience in business, government, and the
academic world. Prior to coming to help
found the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, he served as
president and chief scientific officer of Seattle-based Chiroscience R & D
Inc., a company was formed through the acquisition of Darwin Molecular
Corporation, which Dr. Galas co-founded.
He began his tenure at Darwin Molecular Corporation in 1993 as vice
president of research and development.
Prior to this, Dr. Galas served as director for Health and Environmental
Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Research from 1990
to 1993, where he was responsible for all life sciences research funded by the
Department, including the DOE component of the Human Genome Project. Before his service in Washington, Dr. Galas
was a professor of molecular biology at the University of Southern
California.
Dr. Galas' formal educational training was not in molecular biology, but in
physics. He received his undergraduate
degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and also received
his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California. He has also held posts at the University of
Geneva, Switzerland, and the University of California's Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory. His broad research
interests include several areas of molecular biology and human genetics,
including transposable genetic elements, and the application of mathematical
methods and new technologies in the life sciences. Dr. Galas is a member of
many professional organizations, commissions and boards, including the Human
Genome Organization, the National Academy of Sciences Research Council Board on
Life Sciences and the Board of Governors of the National Center for Genome
Resources. Dr. Galas also serves on
several corporate scientific advisory boards and boards of directors. He has been a member of many federal and
academic advisory groups including the national Biotechnology Policy Board, and
the National Cancer Advisory Board. He
chaired the Biotechnology Research Subcommittee of the Federal Coordinating
Council on Science and Technology for the Office of Science and Technology
Policy. He is also a member of the
Policy Board of the Joint Genome Institute of the University of California, and
the Editorial Board of the Journal of Computational Biology, the Journal
of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology and Functional and
Integrative Genomics. He was a
recipient, with five other scientists, of the Smithsonian, Platinum Technologies
1999 award for his early role in the international human genome project.
Current research interests focus on two areas. The first is the development of new technologies for the
amplification and analysis of nucleic acids.
This work is directed to enabling new methods for high throughput and
accurate data acquisition needed to analyze a variety of biological systems,
and to the development of new diagnostic techniques in medicine. Our recent work in this area has led to a
promising oligonucleotide amplification technology that is rapid, simple and
accurate. In collaboration with Ionian
Technologies Inc. a company organized to commericalize this technology, we are
developing new research tools and diagnostic applications.
The second center interest area centers around the structures of biological
networks and the analysis of their properties.
These studies have focused most recentlyon the statistical structures of
complex biological networks, on the one hand, and the properties and prediction
of gene regulatory and protein-protein interaction networks on the other.