We have great people associated with IMCI and welcome additional participation at any time. Feel free to join – or start! – a working group, collaborate with fellow modelers, come to our weekly Brown Bag Lunch and/or subscribe to the listserv.
James Foster
Distinguished Professor Department of Biological Sciences
Biographical Info
Dr. James A. Foster is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. He is also a Professor and former director of the UI Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) graduate program, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and of Computer Science at UI, and adjunct Professor of Medical Informatics at the University of Washington Medical School. He is also a member of the UI Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST), which is a grass roots initiative of UI faculty and students to research how evolution works and how we can analyze the results of evolution. He is the Science Advisor to the IBEST Computational Resources Core, which provides state of the art computational support for analyzing biological data. He is also the Idaho director for the NSF Science and Technology Center on applied evolution, BEACON, which is a consortium of five institutions (U-Idaho, Michigan State University, University of Texas Austin, North Carolina Agriculture and Technology, and University of Washington) that studies evolution in action.
Dr. Foster’s research areas include development of algorithms for analyzing genomic and metagenomic data, microbial diversity, and evolutionary computation. He has been funded by the NSA (National Security Agency), BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defense Office), NSF (National Science Foundation), and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), and Proctor and Gamble. He has been program chair of both the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO), and the European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP). He has been associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (for which he is the Life Sciences area editor), and the Journal of Evolutionary Computation.