ISB News

Lee’s 75th Birthday and his Influence Network

Oct. 10, 2013

Today, ISB’s president and co-founder, Dr. Lee Hood, celebrates his 75th birthday. To honor this occasion we have invited individuals with a professional connection to Lee Hood to answer some questions in a survey we called “Lee Hood’s Influence Network.” In doing so, we were able to collect information on the myriad associations that Lee has formed over the decades of his illustrious career.

The survey contained a range of questions on the types of associations people had with Lee, when they had them, and what their primary areas of focus for their research was at that time. It also contained some qualitative questions asking about memorable and impactful experiences they had while working with Lee.

A team of ISB scientists and software engineers – Lee Rowen, Bill Longabaugh, Gustavo Glusman and Denise Mauldin – collected the data and generated some interesting visual representations. Lee Rowen also created a scrapbook composed of the memories and statements that people shared about Lee Hood.

Bill generated a BioFabric representation of the Influence Network and Denise Mauldin made an interactive representation using D3.js.

Bill’s BioFabric network measured in at 34-by-126 inches wide. Here is a screen shot of a portion of the work.

BioFabric

Denise’s representation can be interacted with at this link.

Screen capture of d3.js visualization by Denise Mauldin

Bill, Denise, Gustavo and Pei Hao also worked on representing all of Lee Hood’s connections found in PubMed. As stated by Gustavo,

Starting in 1965, Lee published 737 papers, with over 2200 coauthors. This network diagram depicts the co-publication connections between people who coauthored two or more papers with Lee. Blue represents people who coauthored nine or more papers with Lee, and orange represents twenty or more. The emerging clusters in the network reflect sets of related papers, i.e., areas of interest.

Screenshot of Gustavo’s PubMed network:

pubmedHood

Denise also made an interactive version of the Pubmed data, found here.

Happy Birthday to Lee!

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