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.

Bert Overduin has a M.Sc. degree in Biology from Leiden University, The Netherlands, and a Ph.D. from the VU University Amsterdam, where he worked on the isolation of a fungal disease resistance gene from tomato by means of transposon tagging. After a postdoc at the University of California Davis, which focused on disease-associated programmed cell death (apoptosis) in plants, he moved back to the Netherlands and worked for six years as an IT consultant for Capgemini, mostly in the areas of web development, functional application management and business acceptance testing. From 2005 until 2014 he worked at the EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, as a member of the Ensembl Helpdesk and Outreach team. During this time he has given over 300 bioinformatics workshops in 26 countries on five continents, reaching more than 6000 people. Since 1 May 2014 he is working as Training and Outreach Bioinformatician at Edinburgh Genomics, (http://genomics.ed.ac.uk), the high throughput genomics facility of The University of Edinburgh.

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