Barend Mons
From Open Progress
Dr. Barend Mons (1957, The Netherlands) obtained his MSc. (1981, Cum Laude) and his PhD. (1986) at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, majoring in Cell and Molecular Biology.
He then performed over a decade of fundamental research on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites and he published over 45 peer reviewed scientific papers.
Much of this research was conducted in close partnership with colleagues from malaria-endemic (developing) countries.
Then Barend was invited to assist the European Commissions as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, again, especially with developing countries as partners. This is where he became intrigued by the opportunities and challenges of international and multilingual networking in the context of the emerging Web technologies. 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. Meanwhile he had returned to the Netherlands and joined the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (The National research Council, NWO) as a senior adviser on International Health Research. He was one of the founders in 1999 of the company Collexis, commercializing the technology developed originally for SHARED. A major NWO project initiated by Barend and his colleagues is an International Research management system with multiple research councils called I-Research.
In 2002, Barend decided that he had spent enough time in science management and wanted to return to his real passion: research. At present, Barend is Associate Professor in Bio-Semantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Center, University of Rotterdam and Senior Adviser to the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO).
The Group in Rotterdam designs advanced systems for meta-analysis of large numbers of Scientific papers and other data-resources, such as data bases and annotations of molecules. The aim is to develop methods to master the exploding amounts of information generated by modern genomics and proteomics research and to enable in-silico experimentation. As a spin off, the technology is made available for commercialization on the one hand, but on the other hand, the University, in close collaboration with Collexis and NWO has arrangements in place to make the technology developed at the University and prepared for distribution by Collexis, available for Developing Countries under affordable conditions.
