Barend Mons
Barend Mons is a biologist and bioinformatics specialist. Since 2002 he is an Associate Professor in Bio-Semantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam and (since 2005) also at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre, both in The Netherlands.
Mons has a PhD (1986) from Leiden University, and has worked for more than ten years on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites, publishing over 45 research articles.
In 1996 Mons joined the European Commission as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, especially with developing countries as partners. During this time, Mons supported several other international initiatives. He founded one of the first electronic interactive communication systems for science networking with developing countries, SHARED, for which he started to (co-)design thesaurus-based concept extraction technologies in order to match across languages and jargon, with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam as the major partner. In 1999 he joined the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (The National Research Council, NWO) as a senior adviser on International Health Research.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Mons has remained involved in international scientific management and networking at various levels. He was one of the Founding Trustees of the Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Development, which assists people in developing countries to manage their critical IP for the betterment of Society. He also co-founded Knewco, Inc. (2006) and still serves on its board.
His present activities mainly focus on international networking to realise a completely new form of Computer Assisted Distributed Annotation and on-line knowledge discovery, in close collaboration between the University of Rotterdam, Leiden University Medical Centre and Knewco, and largely based on the technology combined with Open Access and WikiProfessional (Open Source Wiki-technology) approaches. He is a member of the Executive Committee for the Innovative Medicines Initiative project known as Open PHACTS.
References
Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barend_Mons
