FORMER AFFILIATED RESEARCHER BORIS STEIPE
Boris Steipe is Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Molecular Genetic at the University of Toronto, Canada. Previously he was Director of the University of Toronto’s Specialist Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2004–2019) and the Collaborative PhD Program in Proteomics and Bioinformatics (2002–2006). From 1995 to 2001 he was the Group Leader at the Gene Center of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany where he worked on rational approaches to protein engineering. He completed his habilitation in Biochemistry and was appointed as Lecturer for the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in 2000; he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department for Structural Biology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany in collaboration with Robert Huber (1990–1994) working on structural engineering approaches to understanding protein folding.
In 1990 he received his PhD on recombinant expression and structural analysis of immunoglobulin domains; while in 1986 he worked as a Software developer in image processing in the private sector. The year previous to this he received his MD from the Faculty of Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University with exchange student terms at the Harvard School of Medicine, Boston, USA (1985), and the Mount Sinaï School of Medicine, New York, USA (1982).
Boris’ overarching research interest are in self-organizing, adaptive systems across scales that range from biomolecules to societies. His recent work focuses on the ontology of time in systems models for self-organization, and the philosophy of emergence in complex systems. Recent publications include:
- “Respect and Reward: Ecology from the Analects of Confucius” (In: Sustainable Development: Asia-Pacific Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 2021) with Yi Chen.
- “Phenomenological Comparison: Pursuing Husserl’s ‘Time Consciousness’ in “Poems by Wang Wei, Paul Celan and Santoka Taneda” (Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2017) with Yi Chen.
- “Schematikon: Detailed Sequence-Structure Relationships from Mining a Non-redundant Protein Structure Database” (ISBRA 2014, Springer Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) with Bhooma Thiruv.
At the Käthe Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies, the topic of his research is: Weightlessness: Three Views on Apocalyptic Disruption and the Recursive Self.