Christian Forst, PhD

Dr. Christian Forst is Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. Previously, he was appointed as Faculty Member at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX from 2008 to 2012. He was Technical Staff Member in the Bioscience Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1999 to 2008. From 1997 to 1999 he served as research associate in bioinformatics at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previous to this position he functioned as group leader in theory of molecular evolutionary dynamics at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Jena, Germany. He is author of about 40 peer reviewed scientific articles which cover a spectrum of research areas such as chaotic behavior in population dynamic problems, generic properties of genotype-phenotype relationships, evolutionary dynamics and phenotypic error thresholds, theory of molecular evolution, evolution in molecular host-pathogen systems, metabolic pathway phylogenies, comparative analysis of pathway relationships, molecular biology foundation of host-pathogen interactions, drug and stress response networks and network proteomics. Highlights in his scientific career include the identification and theoretical description of neutral networks in genotype-phenotype maps and of the phenotypic error threshold in molecular evolution, the phylogenetic analysis of metabolic pathways as well as network assisted drug development against influenza.

He served and is still serving as ad hoc reviewer for journals, such as Advances in Complex Systems, Bioinformatics, BioMed Central Bioinformatics/Systems Biology, BioSilico, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics, Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery, Gene, Genome Biology, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Systems Biology, The New Scientist, and Virus Research. Dr. Forst is member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Cancer Genomics and Proteomics. He also served as reviewer on review panels of the US Department of Energy, the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Forst was further member of the review panel of the Life Sciences:Information Technology Program (IT:LS) of the Industry-University Cooperative Research Program (IUCRP aka UC Discovery Grants), Univ. of California, from 2000 to 2007. Dr. Forst received a distinguished performance scholarship from the University of Vienna, Austria in 1990 and a dissertation award with Magna cum Laude in 1993. He holds a B.S. in Astronomy, a M.S. in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry, all from the University of Vienna, Austria.