Krishna Palaniappan, Ernest Szeto, Frank Korzeniewski, and Rene Perrier have recently joined the center. They are currently working on the new metagenomics project at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), as well as helping introduce software and system development practices to the JGI informatics organization. They were previously senior members of Gene Logic's Data Management Systems organization, and key contributors to the company's software products, including Gene Logic's flagship Genesis platform for gene expression data management and analysis.

Prior to joining Gene Logic, Krishna Palaniappan was a member of the Genome Data Base (GDB), hosted at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, where she worked on the design of the GDB schema and its implementation using the OPM (Object-Protocol Model) tools. Krishna has a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Madras, India, and a master's in computer science from Northern Illinois University. Krishna's interests are in biology and computational genomics. She enjoys reading, cooking and traveling, especially to visit her family in India.

Like Victor Markowitz, Ernest Szeto was a member of the Data Management Group in the Computing Science Research Division at LBNL before joining Gene Logic. At the Lab, Ernest worked on developing data management and integration tools, first based on the Extended Entity-Relationship Model (EERM) and then on the Object-Protocol Model (OPM). The tools developed by Ernest have been widely used at LBNL and at other sites for developing scientific databases. Ernest has a bachelor's degree in engineering from Stanford University and has interests in the study of religion and spirituality.

Before joining Gene Logic, Frank Korzeniewski had a long software engineering career that included developing streaming video input/output libraries and other tools at GlobalStreams Inc., an Internet video company, writing compilers at Ask Jeeves, an Internet search company, and developing large-scale data monitoring applications at Pacific Bell. He occasionally designs and develops hardware, such as video rate digitizers and single board computers in multiprocessor systems, and he is keenly interested in photography.

René Perrier previously worked at BioRad Laboratories developing image analysis and display applications for 1D and 2D electrophoresis gels and the front end to a proteomics database data-mining tool. He also worked at the Geneva University Hospital developing imaging software for 2D electrophoresis gels and for medical image manipulation and display. A native of Geneva, Switzerland, René Perrier earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Geneva University. His hobbies include cooking, rock climbing, hiking and camping in the California wilderness.