Broad's Heng Li Wins 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award - Bio-IT World

“March 14, 2012 | Heng Li, a research scientist at the Broad Institute, is the winner of the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences.  ‘I have to say I’m a little surprised,’ Li told Bio-IT World, of the award, though his contributions speak for themselves. Li made essential contributions to the next generation sequencing (NGS) field with tools like SAMtools, BWA, MAQ,TreeSoft and TreeFam, many of which began as projects during Li’s postdoctoral fellowship with Richard Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute... After his postdoc, Li spent 2002 to 2006 working with BGI on projects including silkworm sequencing, chicken variation study, heterozygote detection for capillary reads, gene finding and CAT alignment software before coming to the Broad. The Franklin Award winner is chosen by voting members of the Bioinformatics.org community, and Li is known for his community contributions beyond the tools he’s developed. He is remarkably active in open forums for bioinformatics like seqanswers.com and biostars.org, always ready to lend a helping hand to new users in the field. In addition to the sequence alignment tools and algorithms that Li has worked on, he’s also developed algorithms for the analysis of gene family evolution, namely TreeBeST, and he participated in the TreeFam and Ensembl GeneTrees databases... Li was one of seven open-source, open-access evangelists short-listed for the 2012 Franklin Award...”