William Hayes, PhD Molecular Biology and Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech, is Director of the Library & Literature Informatics at Biogen Idec. He is focused on extracting the maximum value from the available literature through the use of the best techniques in literature analytics and newer operational guidelines. This goal is in recognition of the amount of unstructured external and internal information required in the discovery, development and manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

He was recently the Head of Cross-Discovery Strategic Informatics at AstraZeneca focusing on various data/text/image mining technologies and knowledge management. Prior to that he was the Bioinformatics project lead for drug target-focused Text Mining. The interest in text mining grew out of frustration with large-scale gene promoter analysis projects at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where time in the library had greatly overtaken computational analyses.

Due to his experience at abusing supercomputing resources due to rather large sequence analysis and other computationally intensive projects, he has also been very active in distributed computing, particularly desktop grid computing. William Hayes ran an evaluation project for desktop distributed computing to support his research at GSK (previously SmithKline-Beecham) and served as part of the project team to initiate the grid computing capability at GSK. His background in Aerospace Engineering and structural engineering experience of jet engines gives him an unusual viewpoint into computational molecular biology and drug discovery as a whole.