Bio
Nicholas Provart is a professor of Plant Cyberinfrastructure and Systems Biology in the Department of Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at the Free University of Berlin in 1996 under the supervision of Lothar Willmitzer. After working as a one of the founding scientists at a small plant biotechnology company in Germany for 4 years, he moved to the RNA Dynamics Group at the Torrey Mesa Research Institute of Syngenta in San Diego where he analyzed arabidopsis gene expression data. Since 2002 he has been at the University of Toronto, where he set up one of the first online bioinformatic resources for plants in 2003. Currently the Bio-Analytic Resource at bar.utoronto.ca, comprising tools for coexpression analysis of publicly-available gene expression data, cis-element prediction, identifying molecular markers, generating “electronic fluorescent pictographic” (eFP) representations of gene expression, and exploring protein-protein interactions in Arabidopsis, is used approximately 60,000 times a month by plant researchers worldwide. Dr. Provart also runs a “wet-lab” for testing in silico-generated hypotheses related to plant abiotic stress response in vivo. Dr. Provart is a past Director of the Collaborative Graduate Program in Genome Biology & Bioinformatics, co-developer of an Undergraduate Specialist Program in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at the University of Toronto, an editor for PLoS One, a member of the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee and of the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium, and chair of the Bioinformatics Subcommittee of the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC).
