Talapady N. Bhat (Fed)

Education and positions held: Dr. Talapady N. Bhat, a research chemist in the Biochemical Science Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Following this, he completed a post-doctoral appointment at Imperial College, London and then joined the National Institute of Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH as a Visiting Scientist. Later he joined the CNRS, France to work as Director of Research II, in Pasteur Institute, Paris. Subsequently, he joined SAIC/NCI as a Senior Scientist, before moving to his current senior position at NIST in 1999.

Area-of scientific interest: His areas of research interests are X-ray crystallography of small chemical compounds and macromolecules, chemical ontology, the Semantic Web, data validation and annotation, software development, bioinformatics, and AIDS research. At present, Dr. Bhat is project leader for bioinformatics in the Biosystems and Biomaterials Division, where he played a key role in the development of several databases (the RCSB Protein Data Bank (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/; the HIV structural database http://bioinfo.nist.gov/SemanticWeb_pr2d/chemblast.do; and ligand gateway for the PDB http://xpdb.nist.gov/pdb/chemblast.html and many others).

Publications and awards: He is the author of over 80 refereed scientific articles and he has given over hundred presentations at national and international professional meetings. His publications have been widely cited (over 11,000 scientific citations). His paper that describes the Protein Data Bank effort has received over 7000 citations. He is a co-author of a patent of an AIDS inhibitor. In 1979, Dr. Bhat was the primary technical architect of the Collaborative Computational Project 4 (CCP4, housed at Cambridge UK) that archives and distributes software for macro-molecular crystallography for many laboratories around the world even today. Subsequently in 1999, the CCPN project for NMR housed at the European Bioinformatics Institute adopted a technical model proposed by him for establishing a software resource for NMR.

Dr. Bhat has won several scientific awards including: two Best Publication Awards from the Science Applications International Corporation; the Science Spectrum Traiblazer Award in 2006; and the prestigious Judson C. French award of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2005. In 2007 Dr. Bhat received the prestigious Emerald Honors.

Current Project: A novel root and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) approach to information indexing and searching