PR. MARTIN YUILLE, BIOCHEMIST FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD VISITS THE STUDENTS FROM THE BIOBANK & DATA MANAGEMENT MASTER

MSc Biobanks and Complex Data Managment pedagogic team and students of this Master were proud to welcome Pr Martin Yuille (UK) who went to give a lecture in Nice at the University Côte d’Azur on the 22th of November 2022.

Martin Yuille is a Biochemist by training, he gained a Bachelor in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford then a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Edinburg (This was the early days of molecular biology = what we would call today bacteriology). During his PhD, he worked on regulation of gene expression in Escherichia coli and discovered the use of restriction endonucleases.

He did a Post doctorate at Stanford University where he worked with mice on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) which led him to be involved in the human genome project based at the University of Cambridge. He was part of the infrastructure that had been created by the medical research council (MRC) to support the human genome project – helping to map chronic diseases.
In 2000 the human genome was first published and in the mean time, he was employed by the University of Manchester and involved in the European biobanking project. The austrian researcher Kurt Zatloukal led the project and Martin Yuille was the associate coordinator. They put together a plan that was accepted by the EU and led to the establishment of the European Biobanking and BioMolecular Resources Infrastructure (BBMRI) in 2007.

It was as a consequence of BBMRI, that the legal instruments were adopted by the European parliament for the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) legal status, and now all the research infrastructures that the EU is building, have a legal basis with ERIC to insure that everything is conducted in a well organized way.
He was the principal investigator for the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) and the UK DNA Banking Network funded by the MRC.