By David Linzee
St. Louis retailer Alvin Goldfarb has established a professorship in computational biology in the genetics department at the School of Medicine. The recipient of the professorship is Sean R. Eddy, Ph.D.
"This chair will support Sean's work in an exciting new area that holds great potential for understanding the human genetic blueprint," Goldfarb said. He and his late wife, Jeanette Rudman Goldfarb, have had a long-standing relationship with the University.
"The Goldfarbs have done much to enhance the relationship between the St. Louis community and the University," said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. "Their vision and generosity have benefited many parts of campus. We are honored that Alvin's name will be attached to an endowed professorship for one of our outstanding young faculty members."
Eddy is developing new tools to probe the genome --the DNA that carries the genes and other structures that provide the blue-print for the body. Although genes that code for proteins have received the most attention, genes that perform other tasks also play vital roles. Eddy focuses on those that produce functional or catalytic RNAs, such as the RNAs in ribosomes, cellular structures that synthesize proteins.
His group uses computational methods to identify genes for small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) and other RNAs. To develop algorithms for recognizing their genes in sequence data, Eddy borrows from the fields of speech recognition, computational linguistics and Bayesian probabilistic modeling.
His combined skills in computer science, information technology and genetics place him in a unique position to interpret the vast amounts of sequence data from the Human Genome Project. Understanding this information will be key to identifying disease genes and to subsequent drug development. Moreover, scientists have speculated that the earliest organisms used RNA for functions that DNA and proteins perform today. So Eddy is investigating the possibility that RNAs in present-day cells may be molecular fossils that could shed light on life's origins.
"We are deeply grateful to Alvin Goldfarb for this commitment to the medical school and the advancement of biomedical science. We are confident that his gift will support striking advances in the interpretation of data from the Human Genome Project, in which the School of Medicine plays a leading role," said William A. Peck, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine.
Goldfarb attended the Olin School of Business, leaving in 1937 to pursue a sales career that led to the presidency of Worth Stores Corporation, a St. Louis-based retailer of women's apparel. He received an honorary doctorate in the humanities in 1999.
Jeanette Rudman Goldfarb graduated from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work in 1936. Her interest in plants and gardening is commemorated in the Jeanette Rudman Goldfarb Plant Growth Facility, which provides the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences with office and lab space as well as a greenhouse.
A 150-seat auditorium in James S. McDonnell Hall bears Alvin Goldfarb's name, as does the multipurpose building that in 1998 doubled the space available to the School of Social Work. The Alvin and Jeanette Goldfarb House, adjacent to the Hilltop campus, provides quarters for the St. Louis Hillel Center.
In addition to contributing to the University's physical plant, the Goldfarbs were founding sponsors of the Scholars in Business Program at the School of Business. Goldfarb has a daughter, Jane, an Olin school graduate, and two sons, James and Robert. He is grandfather of four.
Before coming to Washington University, Eddy was a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Working under John Sulston, Ph.D., and Richard Durbin, Ph.D., both of the Sanger Centre, he developed a new computer-based approach to analyzing RNA sequence and a software package, HMMER, for analyzing protein sequences.
He joined the School of Medicine in 1995 as an assistant professor and became an associate professor earlier this year, when he also was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Assistant Investigator. In 1997, he received the Eli Lilly Biochemistry Academic Contacts Committee Award.
Eddy received his bachelor's degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 and his doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991.