Ross Overbeek received a doctorate in computer science in 1972 from Penn State Univ. He taught at Northern Illinois University for 11 years (in mathematics and computer science). His research areas were computational logic and database systems. From about 1983-1998 he worked at Argonne National laboratory, focusing on parallel computation and logic programming. While a senior scientist at ANL, he became convinced that the fun had gone out of high-performance computing. at a critical moment he met Carl Woese, who convinced him that the most important science during the next decades would be done in biology, and that it would be driven by comparative analysis based on a rapidly growing body of genomic sequence data. He collaborated with Woese and participated in the founding of the Ribosomal Database Project. He went on to participate in the analysis of Methanococcus jannaschii (the first archaeal genome). He was the lead architect of the PUMA and WIT systems at ANL before becoming a founder of Integrated Genomics (where he spent 1998-mid 2003). While at IG he participated in the sequencing and analysis of over 50 genomes and led the bioinformatics effort. The most significant product was ERGO, a system to support comparative analysis. In mid 2003, he left IG to become a founding fellow of FIG (the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes). His efforts at FIG have centered on building a new system for comparative analysis, the SEED, which will be open source and free for all. Since 2004, he has been co-PI of the National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource, a framework to support comparative analysis of pathogen genomes.