Joao Carlos Setubal is an Associate Professor at the Biocomplexity Institute and Department of Computer Science, of Virginia Tech. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington (1992). Between 1992 and 2004 Setubal was at the Institute of Computing of the University of Campinas, in Brazil, his country of origin. During that time he started working on bioinformatics and computational biology, co-authoring a computational biology textbook and leading the bioinformatics effort of several bacterial genome projects. In 2000-01 he spent a sabbatical year in Phil Green's group at the University of Washington, when he had the opportunity to work on the Agrobacterium tumefaciens genome project. Setubal moved to Virginia Tech in 2004, where he has been involved in genomics work of various types, including the bacterial genera Azotobacter, Brucella, Pseudomonas, and Xanthomonas. Setubal's principal focus is the development of computational analysis tools for microbial genomes and metagenomes.