David P Judge is a Computer Scientist that teaches Bioinformatics since 1985. He runs the Bioinformatics Training Facilty housed at the Department of Genetics in the University of Cambridge, providing the necessary environment for graduate and undergraduate courses, on top of a comprehensive training programme in cooperation with the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência through GTPB. He teaches Bioinformatics in several international training programmes and is regularly invited to teach in many places in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. His course notes and exercises are well known in the international community of Bioinformatics professionals and users, many of which (difficult to count) have had their first contact with Bioinformatics through him. David pioneered Bioinformatics Training at the IGC in 1986, in the scope of a MSc course. He collaborates in GTPB regularly since its inception in 1999, several times per year.

Pedro Fernandes graduated in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering at IST (U.T. Lisboa). He worked in Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics and Physiology and changed to Bioinformatics in 1990. He established the first user community in Portugal around the national service provided by the portuguese node of the EMBnet. In 1998 he created the Gulbenkian Training Programme in Bioinformatics, that provided user skills to more than 3200 course attendees throughout its twelve years of existance. In 2002, in cooperation with Mario Silva from FCUL, he designed a graduate Programme in Bioinformatics. He currently teaches Bioinformatics both in graduate and undergraduate programmes.

Javier Santoyo-Lopez has a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University "Autonoma deMadrid", (Madrid, Spain) and an MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Abertay Dundee (Dundee,Scotland, UK). He worked as a Molecular Biologist at the Centre of Molecular Biology "Severo Ochoa" (Madrid, Spain) and then he moved to the field of Bioinformatics working in renowned international centres like the Wellcome Trust Biocentre (Dundee, Scotland, UK), the Sanger Institute (Hinxton, England, UK) or the Spanish National Cancer Centre (Madrid, Spain). In his previous appointment he was the Scientific Coordinator of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Platform of Andalusia (Seville, Spain) supervising the Medical Genome Project (MGP). This was a large scale NGS project that sequenced the exome ofmore than 300 Spanish healthy individuals, to find population variants, and also sequenced a large number of individuals affected by rare diseases, to discover the genetic cause of the disease. Currently he is the BioinformaticsOperations Manager at Edinburgh Genomics, one of the largest Genomics facilities in the UK.

Affiliation Edinburgh Genomics, The University of Edinburgh, Ashworth Laboratories, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK