Honouring our very
BEST
Education Profile: BSc in Mathematics, University of British Columbia MD, University of British Columbia DPhil in Mathematics, University of Oxford
The DRAGON Fall 2009
John Spouge is an award-winning researcher. Even as a student at St. George’s School, John distinguished himself as a talented mathematical mind. In Grade 11, he placed first in the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad. In 1973, as a student at UBC, he placed seventh in North America in the William Lowell Putnam Math Contest. That UBC Putnam team was composed of John, Mark Latham ’70, and Bruce Neilson and came second only to Caltech.
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Currently, he works for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, US, where he is a founding member of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (or NCBI). The NCBI was created specifically to meet the challenges presented by the Human Genome Project and was the first organization specifically devoted to the biological specialties now known as bioinformatics and computational biology. John has also collaborated extensively with AIDS researchers under Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS antibody test, to develop mathematical models in evaluating potential AIDS therapies. Recently, he has also contributed to efforts to catalogue all the plant species on the Earth.