Barry Robson BSc(Hons) PhD DSc (IBM Distinguished Engineer), is Strategic Advisor at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, at Yorktown Heights, NY, where he played a key role in proposals leading to IBM's DiscoveryLink, Blue Gene protein science and Secure Health and Medical Access Network (S.H.A.M.A.N.) projects. He is active within and outside IBM in regard to studies in innovation and technical vitality at corporate and national level; he served on the Innovation Frontiers and the National Innovation Initiative and contributed to the important report “Innovate America. National Innovation Initiative Report” (Council on Competitiveness, December 2004). He is also Program Director Computational Medicine, Council Member of the Deep Computing Institute, an Organizer of the IBM Academy of Technology Study on Enabling Technologies for Information Based Medicine, and a consultant and advisor within IBM’s “On Demand Services” program. He was recently Professional Interest Communities Chair in computational biology and medicine and will continue to participate through the contemporary Chair. His scientific and medical expertise and interests at IBM are in regard to biomolecular medicine, healthcare and the digital patient record with pharmacogenomic and other data, information technology support of bio-ethics, and high dimensional clinical data mining for diagnosis, prognosis, and research.

In addition to his IBM roles, Barry is also Honorary Professor of Clinical Informatics and Molecular Sciences at St Matthews Medical School, Grand Cayman, and Chair of The Dirac Foundation at the Department of Experimental Surgery and Oncology at St. Mary's Hospital, Imperial College London. The foundation was formed by Barry with the support of Margit Dirac widow of Nobel Laureate Paul Dirac to honor Professor Dirac and to promote understanding of the importance of theoretical physics, chemistry, and biology to human and veterinary medicine. Recently (2001-2004), he also held the title of Professorial Lecturer at Mount Sinai Medical School, New York.

Barry was trained as a medical scientist and later in computational chemical physics. According to an article in Nature (389,418-420,1997), he was a pioneer in bioinformatics, protein modeling, and computer-aided drug design. He was awarded the Asklepios Statue Future of Health Technology Award at the Future of Health Technology Summit 2001 at MIT, for “outstanding breakthrough innovators and leaders who made significant impact on the future of health technology.” He has sat on the board of five biopharmaceutical companies and scientific founder or cofounder of several commercial and semi-commercial R&D organizations. This includes the Proteus group of pharmaceutical companies where as founder he served as Science Director for some 9 years, helping take Proteus International plc successfully to the London Stock exchange in 1990 (now Protherics plc). During that period or earlier Barry was consultant to several major pharmaceutical companies and was advisor to, or served for, to the Danish Research Council, the European Commission, the Bioindustry Association, and the European Bioinformatics Institute and various publishing bodies. At the end of the "Cold War" Barry also assisted Feinstein Partners (Cambridge Mass.) working with a government official exploring possibilities for US-Russian scientific collaboration via the Internet. Barry has variously held Readerships or Professorships or similar at the Universities of Manchester and South Paris, and the Technical High School of Denmark, and as Common Room Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford. Later he was Visiting Scholar lecturing in bioinformatics at Stanford University Medical School in California where he also assisted companies in the industrialization phase of start-up ventures, including Gryphon Sciences as CSO and MDL Information Systems as Principal Scientist.

As a researcher Barry is author of some 200 papers, books and patents. He developed the Bayesian and information-theoretic basis for bioinformatics in a series of papers in Nature and the Journal of Molecular Biology from 1970-1978; the 1970 Nature paper with Roger Pain is believed to be the first to do protein structure prediction on a statistical quantitative basis, and the 1978 paper with Jean Garnier and David Osguthorpe was designated a multiple "Citation Classic" by the Institute for Scientific Information and in 1999 this paper was described on the Journal of Molecular Biology web page as the number 11 in the top 100 most cited J.Mol.Biol. papers for 40 years. More recently, his paper on the Genomic Messaging System with Richard Mushlin was judged a paper of special merit and made a press release by the American Chemical Society, and was cited as one of nine top technologies to watch by Healthcare Informatics magazine. He is coauthor of the widely used 700 page university textbook "Introduction to Proteins and Protein Engineering" by Robson and Garnier. Barry was also a Nature "New and Views" correspondent on proteins and related matters for some five years. Barry was coinventor of various clinical and veterinary products, including the Protherics/Enfer diagnostic for Mad Cow Disease marketed by Abbott, early HIV diagnostics in work which included the earliest publication in Nature of proposed HIV epitopes for vaccine work, methods of biosensors and synthetic chemistry, clinical systems and data mining, and of various commercial molecular analysis and design systems and languages in industrial use. Barry is also with Jean Garnier (Chair of the IUPAB and IUBG) the coordinator of the Bioinformatics Industrialization Workshops on medicine hosted at the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge Mass. and the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton UK. The ongoing Workshops are variously sponsored by the US Department of Energy, The Deep Computing Institute, IBM Life Sciences, The Wellcome Trust, and the International Union of Pure And Applied Biophysics, which at Hinxton with the InterUnions Bioinformatics Group, with Barry as Taskforce advisor, submitted the recent "Whitepaper" report on the state and quality of bioinformatics to UNESCO and the ICSU.
Barry is a member of The Biochemical Society (UK), biomedical-related standards bodies including HL7 Inc. He is also a principal investigator or similarly active in several scientific collaborations, concerning clinical data and healthcare or education, including Cambridge University UK, The University of British Columbia, a Virginia state-wide university-based digital record initiative, the University of California San Francisco, Boston University.