Nikos Kyrpides

Kyrpides has received several awards, including the 2018 USFCC/J. Roger Porter Award from the American Society for Microbiology, the 2014 van Niel International Prize for Studies in Bacterial Systematics from the International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS), a 2007 outstanding-performance award from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the 2012 Academic Excellence Prize from the Empirikion Foundation. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) (2014), and has been on the Thomson Reuters list of the world’s most frequently-cited scientists since 2014. A bacterial genus (Kyrpidia) was named after Kyrpides in 2011. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Kyrpides proposed the development of a Microbial Environmental Genomics Administration in 2009, analogous to NASA, for the study and exploration of the most abundant life on the planet. In 2016, following the enormous growth of microbiome data, he outlined the need for a common infrastructure for microbiome data analysis and proposed the development of a National Microbiome Data Center (NMDC), later renamed to National Microbiome Data Collaborative. With Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh, Kyrpides organized the first NMDC workshop to launch this initiative at the Joint Genome Institute. This was followed by additional workshops in 2017 hosted by the American Society for Microbiology to promote the initiative.

Kyrpides began the MikroBioKosmos (MBK) initiative in Greece in 2007, with the goal of exploring and commercially using microbial national resources. MikroBioKosmos became a scientific society, with Kyrpides its first president. He is a founding member of two bioinformatics societies in Greece: the Hellenic Society of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (HSCBB) in 2010 and Hellenic Bioinformatics in 2016. Kyrpides is also a board member of the international Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), which aims to enable genomic data integration, discovery and comparison with international, community-driven standards.

He began the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) project at the JGI and the Microbial Earth Project with Hans-Peter Klenk, Philip Hugenholtz and Jonathan Eisen in 2007, with the goal of improving the genome characterization of phylogenetically-diverse cultured microbes. The latter project evolved into an international effort to sequence all the type strains of bacteria and archaea, through a series of GEBA 1,000-genome projects. The rapid growth of microbial genome sequences at the end of 2010, without a parallel venue for describing those projects in a standardized manner, led to the need for a new scientific forum which would be a clearinghouse for capturing and presenting this information to the community. This idea led Kyrpides, George Garrity and Dawn Field to launch a new scientific journal: Standards in Genomic Sciences (SIGS), which became part of BioMed Central.

Kyrpides was born in Serres, Greece, where he studied biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received his PhD in molecular biology and biotechnology from the University of Crete. He pursued postdoctoral studies in microbiology with Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in bioinformatics with Ross Overbeek at the Argonne National Laboratory. From 1999 to 2004 Kyrpides worked in the biotech industry in Chicago, where he led the development of genome analysis and bioinformatics. He joined the United States Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in 2004 to lead the Genome Biology Program and develop the data management and comparative analysis platforms for microbial genomes and metagenomes. Kyrpides became the Metagenomics Program head in 2010 and founded the Prokaryotic Super Program in 2011, which he still leads with the Microbiome Data Science Group.