Ian Korf received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D from Indiana University. His formal training is in molecular biology but he has had a fondness for computer programming since his early teens. His post-doctoral research at Washington University in St. Louis and at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. has focused on genomic sequence analysis with an emphasis on comparative genomics and gene prediction. His goal in life is to follow genomes, wherever they happen to take him.

Mark Yandell received his PhD in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. After graduation, he joined the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, where he pursued post-doctoral studies in computational biology, genome annotation and SNP discovery. In 1999 he joined Celera Genomics, where he wrote much of the software used by Celera to annotate and analyze the drosophila, human, mouse and mosquito genomes. He recently joined the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project.

Joseph Bedell received his B.S. in Genetics from the University of Georgia in 1991 then worked on mosquito genetics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He went on to complete a Ph.D. in human genetics at the University of California, Irvine in 1999. Joseph, like his co-authors, completed a post-doc in mammalian gene annotation with Warren Gish, one of the original developers of BLAST. He is currently the Director of Bioinformatics for Orion Genomics in St. Louis where he spends his days (and nights) using BLAST to answer important biological and phylogenetic questions in plants.