Goran Neshich, Ph.D., is the Structural Computational Biology (SCB) group leader at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), National Agricultural Information Technology Research Center (CNPTIA), Campinas - SP, Brazil, and associate professor at UNICAMP’s Department of Biology and at the UFMG's Institute for Biological Sciences.

Neshich started his work in structural bioinformatics while studying structure and function relationship of the photosynthetic reaction center during his graduate work done with Don DeVault at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983-1988). He conducted his postdoctoral research with Barry Honig at Columbia University (1997-1998).

Neshich is the principal author of STING suite of programs (with the current version being BlueStarSTING), and STING_DB. STING is a popular database and visualization tool providing the largest collection of physicochemical parameters that describe protein structure, stability, function, and interaction with other macromolecules. STING is accessible from number of STING mirrors hosted by collaborative institutes on 4 continents. STING received approximately 15 million accesses since 1998.

Neshich has published 46 papers in indexed scientific journals and 102 abstracts at the meetings and congresses. He conceptualized 45 software packages and is the author of the First databank from Latin America which made it to the compendium of the Nucleic Acid Research - Database Issue: the STING_DB. He gave 80 seminars and talks at the congresses and research institutions at 15 countries from 5 continets. He was co-adviser for 7 PhD theses, 5 Master's degree theses and 4 scientific initiation works in the area of Computational Biology. Currently, Neshich is advising and co-advising theses work of 15 students: one (1) master's degree, nine (9) PhD, two (2) scientific initiation and three (3) internees. From 1990 through 2008 he coordinated 14 research projects and co-particpated in other 3 projects, with financial input under his coordination of approximately US$1.5 Million.

Neshich's latest initiative is further developing the STING RDB and by using this unique resource / tool, advance our understanding of the relationship between sequence, structure and function of proteins, and consequently, to be able to describe in more details protein - protein and protein-substrate interaction. More about his research may be found at www.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br.

Neshich chaired a session at the meeting in Angra dos Reis - RJ, held in November 2004, where the Brazilian Association for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (AB³C) has been inaugurated. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) from 2003 to 2005 and chair of the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2006 conference in Fortaleza, Brazil.

Last update: January 14, 2009