Bernhard Palsson is The Galetti Professor of Bioengineering and Adjunct Professor Medicine at the University of California, San Diego.

Brief History

Professor Palsson earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1984. He held a faculty position at the University of Michigan from 1984 to 1995. He has been with UCSD since 1995. He is the author of over 250 peer reviewed scientific articles. He co-authored the text TISSUE ENGINEERING, Prentice Hall in 2004, and SYSTEMS BIOLOGY, Cambridge University Press in 2006. He sits on the editorial boards of several bioengineering and biotechnology journals.

Research Interest

Professor Palsson current research at UCSD focuses on 1) the reconstruction of genome-scale biochemical reaction networks, 2) the development of mathematical analysis procedures for genome-scale models, and 3) the experimental verification of genome-scale models with current emphasis on cellular metabolism and transcriptional regulation in E. coli and Yeast.

Awards

Professor Palsson received an Institute of International Education Fellowship in 1977, Rotary Fellowship in 1979, a NATO fellowship in 1984, was named the G.G. Brown Associate Professor at Michigan in 1989, a Fulbright Fellow in 1995, an Ib Henriksen Fellow in 1996, the Olaf Hougen Professorship at the University of Wisconsin in 1999, the Lindbergh Tissue Engineering award in 2001, was named the Galetti Chair of Bioengineering in 2004, was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2006, received the UCSD Chancellor's Associates award in Science and Technology in 2006, and was selected as the developer of one of the most influential technologies on Biotech over the past 10 years by Nature Biotechnology (March 2006). He was the Richard S.H. Mah Lecturer at Northwestern University in 2007, received the Ernst W. Bertner Memorial Award, from the MD Anderson in Houston in 2008, and an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2009.

Patenting

Professor Palsson is an inventor with 28 U.S. patents, many of which are in the area of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, cell culture technology, bioreactor design, gene transfer, cell separations, high-throughput single cell manipulation, network reconstruction, in silico model building and metabolic engineering.

Technology transfer

He co-founded a biotechnology company, AASTROM BIOSCIENCES (NASDAQ: ASTM) in 1988, where he served as the Vice President of Developmental Research for two years. Dr. Palsson is the founder and co-founder of ONCOSIS, a company that was focused on the purging of occult tumor cells in autologous bone marrow transplants, renamed as CYNTELLECT (www.cyntellect.com), focusing on instrumentation for high-throughput screening and in situ cell sorting and processing, and GENOMATICA (www.genomatica.com), a company that is focused on in silico biology (a spin-off from UCSD).

Abstract

Reconstruction of genome-scale transcriptional regulatory networks in enterobacteria

A suite of genome-scale measurements, including rna polymerase chip-chip, tiled expression arrays, transcriptional start site sequencing, and proteomics, have been used to map the transcription unit architecture (tua) of e. coli. on top of this tua, comprehensive sets of sigma and transcription factors chip-chip data has been mapped to generate a draft to the transcriptional regulatory network (trn). Topological and functionals state modeling procedures and challenges will be discussed. Similar data sets are being built for salmonella, klebsiella and yersinia.