Chris Baker

Chris graduated in agriculture and environmental sciences from Newcastle University and then completed a PhD in microbiology at Cardiff University. He spent his postdoc years in Canada at the University of Toronto. Transitioning to bioinformatics Chris led a genomics-based drug discovery team screening for natural product loci in fungi at Ecopia BioSciences. At I2R A-STAR, the Government of Singapore, his team developed semantic infrastructures to support the automated classification of Eicosanoids and invented natural language processing algorithms to extract genomic annotations from the scientific literature. Returning to Canada Chris took up an ACOA Research Chair further pioneering in semantic interoperability solutions applied, primarily to data integration in biomedicine, biodiversity, global health and agriculture. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals, conference proceedings, and a book. He is the inventor of 2 Patents filed with the USPTO. Chris was a panelist at the 2016 GODAN Summit, High-Level Forum at the United Nations and an invited speaker on Linked Open Data in Agriculture at the 2017 Meeting of the G20 Agricultural Chief Scientists. In 2019 his research team was awarded first prize for Outstanding Research Articles in Bio-surveillance by the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS). Also active in entrepreneurship, Chris has been an invited resident at Canadian Technology Accelerators hosted by the Canadian High Commissions and Consulates in London and in Boston, a mentee at the MIT Enterprise Forum.