Lawrence E. "Larry" Hunter (born January 18, 1961, in the United States) is an American bioinformatician, researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, and professor at the University of Chicago.[1,4] He was also associated with George Mason University, served as the founder and director of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.[5,3] He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989 under advisor Roger Schank, with the dissertation titled "Knowledge acquisition planning: Gaining expertise through experience".
Hunter is an internationally known scholar focused on computational biology, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data.[7,11,1] His foundational work in computational biology led to the genesis of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), which named him an ISCB Fellow in 2010, and two international conferences, including Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB).[7,11,1]
Life and Biography
Lawrence Hunter was born on January 18, 1961 in America.
Education
Hunter completed his PhD at Yale University in 1989 with a thesis on Knowledge Acquisition Planning: Gaining Expertise Through Experience, on diagnosis of lung cancer from histological images using Case-based reasoning, under the guidance of Roger Schank.[9,6]
Career and research
Faced with a choice between careers in the main applications of artificial intelligence—game programming and defense work—Hunter chose an emerging new discipline, bioinformatics. From 1989 to 2000, Hunter worked as a computer scientist and section chief for National Institutes of Health sections devoted to statistical and bioinformatic research. He was an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University from 1991 through 2000 and an associate professor in the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine from 2000 to 2008. He was promoted to professor in 2008.[10,8] He moved to the University of Chicago in 2024.[4]
ISCB
In 1997, Hunter founded the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), which has become the largest professional organization in computational biology and bioinformatics.
Conferences
Hunter was a founder of three successful international conferences in bioinformatics: the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), and the Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference.[13] He is also a co-organizer of the biological visualization conference Vizbi.[14,12] Hunter cofounded and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Molecular Mining Corporation from 1997 to 2003.
Awards and honors
Hunter is credited with being one of the founders of the field of bioinformatics. Throughout his career, Hunter has researched and directed research groups investigating the development and application of advanced computational techniques for biomedicine to high-throughput assays, particularly the application of statistical and knowledge-based techniques, in particular bio-ontologies, to the analysis of high-throughput data and of biomedical texts. He has proposed neurobiologically and evolutionarily informed computational models of cognition and ethical issues related to computational bioscience, and has argued for the expansion of data science activities in biomedicine to include knowledge-based methods.[9]
Hunter is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, became an ISCB Fellow in 2010, and won the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2003 Engelmore Prize for Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. His other awards and honors include the Regent's Award for Scholarship and Technical Achievement in 1994, the National Library of Medicine Meritorious Service Award from 1991 through 1998, the University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics Excellence in Teaching Award in 2004, and the Department of Pharmacology Excellence in Research Award in 2007.
Publications
Selected publications include the 1986 paper "Transcending inductive category formation in learning" by R. C. Schank, G. C. Collins, and L. E. Hunter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, as well as "Planning to learn" in The Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Boston, MA., July 1990, pp. 26–34, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.). In 1993, AAAI Press published Artificial intelligence and molecular biology. In 2000, Hunter co-authored "EDGAR: Extraction of drugs, genes and relations from the biomedical literature" with T. Rindflesch, L. Tanabe, and J. Weinstein in Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and contributed to the Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing with T. C. Rindflesch and J. V. Rajan. Later papers include the 2007 article "Manual curation is not sufficient for annotation of genomic databases" in Bioinformatics by W. A. Baumgartner, K. B. Cohen, L. M. Fox, G. Acquaah-Mensah, and L. Hunter; the 2008 study "OpenDMAP: An open source, ontology-driven concept analysis engine, with applications to capturing knowledge regarding protein transport, protein interactions and cell-type-specific gene expression" in BMC Bioinformatics by L. Hunter, Z. Lu, J. Firby, W. A. Baumgartner Jr, H. L. Johnson, P. V. Ogren, and K. B. Cohen; and the 2009 article "Biomedical Discovery Acceleration, with Applications to Craniofacial Development" in PLOS Computational Biology by S. M. Leach, H. Tipney, W. Feng, W. A. Baumgartner, P. Kasliwal, R. P. Schuyler, T. Williams, R. A. Spritz, and L. Hunter. In 2009, Lawrence Hunter also authored the book The processes of life: an introduction to molecular biology, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts by MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-01305-3).
