BALDI, Pierre

PERSONAL:

Born in Rome, Italy; children: Marco Jazz, Julia Melody. Ethnicity: "White." Education: University of Paris X, M.S. (psychology), 1980; University of Paris VII, M.S. (mathematics), 1980, D.E.A. (mathematics), 1981; École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avanceés, (Paris, France), M.S. (computer science and engineering), 1983; California Institute of Technology, Ph.D. (mathematics), 1986. Hobbies and other interests: Flamenco guitar.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3425. E-mail—pfbaldi@ics.uci.edu.

CAREER:

Researcher and educator. University of California, San Diego, visiting lecturer, 1986-88; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, member of technical staff at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1988-95, visiting research associate, 1988-95, member of division of biology, 1995-96; Net-ID, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, chairman and chief executive officer, 1991-99; University of California, Irvine, associate professor, 1999-2001, professor of information and computer science, 2001—, director of Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, 2001—. University of Florence, Florence, Italy, visiting professor, 1999.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Lew Allen Award, California Institute of Technology, 1993; Laurel Wilkening Faculty Innovation Award, University of California, Irvine, 1999.

WRITINGS:

(With Søren Brunak) Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning Approach, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998, revised edition, 2001.

The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

(With G. Wesley Hatfield) DNA Microarrays and Gene Regulation: From Experiments to Data Analysis and Modeling, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Paolo Frasconi and Padhraic Smyth) Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms, Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Back-Propagation: Theory, Architectures, and Applications, edited by Y. Chauvin and D. E. Rumelhart, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995, and Information, Coding, and Mathematics, edited by M. Blaum, Kluwer, 2002. Contributor of articles to professional journals, including Bioinformatics, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Neural Computation.

SIDELIGHTS:

In The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution, Pierre Baldi examines the future of human evolution. In the work, Baldi—a professor of biological chemistry and computer science at the University of California, Irvine—suggests that advances in biotechnology and computer sciences, like cloning, will allow humans the "ability to experiment with unlimited variations of our actual self," according to Andrew Robinson in a review of The Shattered Self for the British Medical Journal. This scenario, remarked Steven R. Quartz in American Scientist, "will force us to rethink what it means to be human, from our beliefs about self, life and death to our understanding of intelligence and sexuality." A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that in The Shattered Self, Baldi "emphasizes that, in the quest for self-knowledge, we must face these scientific challenges openly."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, summer, 2001, Aaron E. Hirsh, review of The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution, p. 146.

American Scientist, November, 2001, Steven R. Quartz, "Who Do We Think We Are?," p. 559.

Bioscience, March, 2000, Jeremy C. Ahouse, "Bioinformatics—A Middle Way," p. 264.

British Medical Journal, September 22, 2001, Andrew Robinson, review of The Shattered Self, p. 699.

Cell, February 19, 1999, Oxana K. Pickeral and Mark S. Boguski, review of Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning Approach, pp. 451-455.

Lancet, February 16, 2002, Stuart Spencer, "Unnatural Evolution," p. 635.

New Scientist, July 14, 2001, Laurence Hurst, review of The Shattered Self, p. 50.

Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2001, review of The Shattered Self, p. 232.

Quarterly Review of Biology, December, 1998, Dennis E. Slice, review of Bioinformatics, p. 554.

ONLINE

Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics Web site,http://www.igb.uci.edu/ (December 22, 2003).

University of California, Irvine, School of Information and Computer Science Web site,http://www.ics.uci.edu/ (December 22, 2003).