Nine University of Alberta scholars made the latest list of the world’s most highly cited researchers, highlighting their impact in fields from engineering to health and environmental science.
Bioinformatics researcher Jason Grant has more than 18,000 citations for work he did as part of teams that created open databases including DrugBank (pharmaceuticals), HMDB (metabolites) and PHASTER (nucleic acids).
“Each project involved years of collaborative work to build tools that make complex biological data freely accessible and easy to interpret,” says Grant. “Their continued use and citation reflect how open, well-maintained databases can accelerate discovery across many areas of science and medicine.”
Grant collaborated with this year’s winner of Canada’s top science and engineering prize, David Wishart, a world leader in metabolomics.
Among the other most influential researchers from the U of A are soil scientist Scott Chang, wildfire expert Mike Flannigan, and leading cancer and nutrition scholar Carla Prado.
Gane Wong, an international leader in genomics, also made the list, as did materials innovator Hongbo Zeng.
Rounding out this year’s U of A top tier are evolutionary biologist and Canada Excellence Research Chair Shinichi Nakagawa, and Valerie Carson, a behavioural epidemiologist and expert on helping kids get active.