Shpaer Yevgeny (Gera) Grigoryevich (1957, Riga) ― biological scientist. In 1980 he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Latvia. In 1980―88 he worked at the Institute of Organic Synthesis of the Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Doctor of Chemical Sciences R. Zhuk. He was one of the first scientists in the field of bioinformatics in the USSR, publishing pioneering papers in which he discovered the “translational efficiency code” in the bacterium E. coli, defending his candidate's dissertation on this basis in 1988. In 1989 he emigrated to the US, where in 1989―93 he undertook postdoctoral study at the Department of Microbiology of Stanford University. He studied the transmission and evolution of the AIDS virus and other lentiviruses. In 1993 he took a position at Applied Biosystems (ABI), the world's largest manufacturer of biotechnology instruments and reagents. At ABI he founded a bioinformatics group, which developed new products ― genetic tests. In 1999―2002 he worked at Celera Genomics, where he was a member of the team sequencing the genomes of the fruit fly and the human. He is the author of more than 30 scientific papers, and holds 14 US patents and 7 international patents.

Works: The secondary structure of mRNAs from Escherichia coli: its possible role in increasing the accuracy of translation Nucleic Acids Res. 1985. 275―88; Constraints on codon context in Escherichia coli genes. Their possible role in modulating the efficiency of translation Mol. Biol. 1986. 188, 555―64; Conserved V3 loop sequences and transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 AIDS Res. Hum. Retroviruses. 1994. 12, 1679-84. (Co-authored); Rates of amino acid change in the envelope protein correlate with pathogenicity of primate lentiviruses, Mol. Evol. 1993. 37, 57―65. (Co-authored); The genome sequence of Drosophila melanogaster Science. 2000, Mar. 24. 287(5461):2185-95; The sequence of the human genome Science. 2001, Feb. 16. 291(5507):1304-51. I. Brod