Michael holds a B.Sc. in Applied Biology and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Cardiff University. After completing an EU-funded postdoctoral fellowship at University of Wales, Bangor, he joined GlaxoSmithKline to lead a computational biology team focused on the use of genetic, genomic and chemogenomic approaches for drug discovery and patient stratification. He also championed pre-competitive collaboration among pharma and with academia, and co-led an EFPIA team of pharmaceutical companies to gain €10M Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funding for the OpenPhacts project (www.openphacts.org), which is constructing “an open pharmacological space” – a suite of public bio- and cheminformatics resources for drug discovery. Michael now serves on the scientific advisory board of the OpenPhacts project. Michael is also passionate about improving the translational and collaborative interface between industry and academia. After fourteen years at GSK, he followed his passion for improving R&D collaborative interfaces to co-found Open Innovation Pharma Partners, with Dr Jackie Hunter, CBE. Michael joined the William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) in 2012 as the Director of Bioinformatics. His team are working across all research areas of the WHRI focused on the application of computational biology and bioinformatics to improve translational research.
Michael has published extensively and serves on several scientific advisory boards. He also edited the successful John Wiley Book, Bioinformatics for Geneticists, the third edition of which will be published in 2013. He holds a visiting Senior Lecturer post at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London.

Dr Barnes has broad computational biology research interests spanning the translational research and  drug discovery continuum, from genetic and genomic methods for target identification to clinical informatics and patient stratification.  Active research projects in his team fall into the following key areas:

Pathway analysis of Genetic and Genomic data: Genome wide association studies (GWAS) and exome studies of complex trait pathology and drug response, including, Hypertension, Arrhythmia and Cardiovascular disease.
Exome and Whole Genome Re-sequencing: NGS pipeline development, Re-sequencing studies, causal variant identification and functional analysis.
Transcriptomic analysis: RNA-seq based transcriptomic analysis for biomarker identification and stratification of medicine response in Rheumatoid Arthritis (small