Goran Neshich, Ph.D., is leader of the Computational Biology Research Group (CBRG) at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), National Agricultural Information Technology Research Center (CNPTIA), Campinas – SP, Brazil.
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 received approximately 17 million accesses since 1998.
Neshich has published 54 papers in indexed scientific journals and 125 abstracts at the meetings and congresses. He co-authored 4 patents and conceptualized 51 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 more than 100 seminars and talks at the congresses and research institutions at 16 countries from 5 continents. He was co-adviser for 19 PhD theses, 6 Master’s degree theses and 6 scientific initiation works as well as for 3 postdocs in the area of Computational Biology. Currently, Neshich is advising and co-advising theses work of two students: two (2) PhD. From 1990 through 2017 he coordinated 24 research projects and co-participated in other 3 projects, with financial input under his coordination of approximately US$1.7 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. His special interest now is in high throughput screening and rational drug and agrochemical design. 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 the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2006 Conference Chair in Fortaleza, Brazil. Neshich served as the member of the Excutive Borad of EMBnet from 2012 to 2015 when he resigned. In April of 2012 Neshich orginized São Paulo Shool of Advanced Sciences: Advanced Topics in Computational Biology – Agrochemical and Drug Design (ESPCA_CBADD). Currently Neshich is the leader of the Structural Computational Biology Research Group at Embrapa.
