Barend Mons
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Dr. Barend Mons is a biologist and specialist in bioinformatics. Since 2002 he has been Associate Professor in Bio-Semantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam and (since 2005) at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre, both in The Netherlands.
Dr. Mons obtained his MSc. (1981, Cum Laude) and his PhD. (1986) at the University of Leiden, in The Netherlands, majoring in Cell and Molecular biology. Mons performed over a decade of fundamental research on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites, publishing over 45 peer reviewed scientific papers on that topic.
In 1996 Dr. Mons was invited to assist the European commission as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, especially with developing countries as partners. During this ‘Science Management Period’ Dr Mons supported several other international initiatives. He became intrigued by the opportunities and challenges of international and multilingual networking in the context of the emerging Web technologies. He founded one of the first electronic interactive communication systems for science networking with developing countries, SHARED, for which he started to (co-)design thesaurus based concept extraction technologies in order to match across languages and jargon, with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam as the major partner. In 1999 he joined the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (The National research Council, NWO) as a senior adviser on International Health Research.
Despite his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Mons has remained involved in International Scientific Management and Networking at various levels. He was one of the Founding Trustees of The Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Development, which assists people in Developing countries to manage their critical IP for the betterment of Society. He also serves on the board of Knewco, Inc. (co-founded by Mons in 2005).
His present activities mainly focus on International networking to realise a completely new form of Computer Assisted Distributed Annotation and on-line Knowledge discovery, in close collaboration between the University of Rotterdam, University of Leiden and Knewco, and largely based on the Knewco Knowlet technology combined with Open Access and Open Source Wiki-technology approaches.
