Dr Jean-Paul Ebejer read an undergraduate bachelors degree in I.T. at the University of Malta, graduating with honours in 2000. Immediately after he moved to Germany, where he worked for IBM as an IT specialist on Foreign Exchange and Money Market systems for Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank. In 2004 he started working for Ixaris Systems, on their flagship product Entropay, where he eventually became a technical architect. Following an MGSS scholarship and his strong interest in biological systems, data sciences, and "anything for which an explanation is in short supply" he successfully completed, with distinction, an M.Sc. in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology at Imperial College, London (2008-2009). He was then awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to undertake a doctoral degree in structural bioinformatics and computational drug discovery at the University of Oxford. He completed his D.Phil. in early 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Charlotte Deane and Prof. Garrett Morris.
During his years in industry he has always kept a strong link with academia and has lectured a variety of technical courses. He is a keen Java enthusiast and has been an invited speaker at the Java Users Group. He finds it hard to admit that he prefers Python nowadays.
Dr Ebejer (but everyone calls him JP) has been rather concerned lately about the increasing number of media reports that the world is not going to end because of climate change, nuclear war, zombie (or alien) attack, or a second ice age, but rather because our current stock of medicines are fast becoming ineffective against evolving pathogens. As a consequence, he has used data science, bioinformatics and cheminformatics techniques to find novel, active molecules to help fight antibiotic resistance. Formally, he has done this in a number of EU projects. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is currently employed as a Lecturer at the University of Malta and, in the past, has been part of the problem setting committee of the yearly ICTSA Programming Competition.
