The Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CBB) community is mourning the September 26 death of academic leader and valued colleague Professor Philip Benfey. Along with his scientific acuity and accomplishments, which were recognized by election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, Philip’s visionary contributions to developing interdisciplinary research at Duke spanning cell and molecular biology and quantitative network analysis inspired numerous CBB faculty, students, and postdocs. In what follows, we honor Philip's impact on CBB and its people; a more general description of his life and work outside of CBB can be found here: https://today.duke.edu/2023/10/duke-flags-lowered-philip-benfey-plant-biologist-who-studied-roots-window-development-dies
With a commitment to the nascent field of genomics in his own research, and on the heels of fruitful collaborations with mathematicians at NYU and the Courant Institute, Philip Benfey arrived to Duke in 2002 ready to support and invest in the field of computational biology. Within a year, Philip had established the Biological Networks Group, with weekly meetings that brought together an interdisciplinary group of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from around the university to discuss experimental and computational aspects of transcriptional regulatory networks.
These conversations led to an early 2005 proposal to NIH to establish a new Center for Systems Biology that involved CBB mathematician John Harer, physicist Josh Socolar, engineer Lingchong You, computer scientists Pankaj Agarwal, Herbert Edelsbrunner, and Alex Hartemink, and biologists Steve Haase, Paul Magwene, Dave McClay, Greg Wray, and himself. The proposal was not funded, but it generated high levels of excitement on the campus and attracted still more people to the effort: CBB statisticians Sayan Mukherjee, Scott Schmidler, and Mike West, bioinformatician Uwe Ohler, and mathematician David Schaeffer.
A 2006 proposal resubmission with these new faculty, a clearer focus, and a greater sense of ambition was funded by NIH, resulting in the launch of the Duke Center for Systems Biology (DCSB) in 2007. Philip shifted from serving as the Chair of the Biology Department to the Director of the DCSB, a position he held throughout the duration of its funding from NIH. The Center elevated the role of systems biology within the CBB program, resulting in new courses in the curriculum, annual retreats and symposia to present cutting-edge science, and new CBB faculty like Ryan Baugh, Amy Schmid, and Nick Buchler. In founding the DCSB and carrying forward its vision, Philip brought together a large collection of CBB faculty and students from different disciplines, forging them into a community who celebrated one another's scientific discoveries.
Philip was effective not only at the level of institutional innovation and large-scale leadership, but also at the level of individual hands-on training and mentoring. His large research group studying Arabidopsis root development was its own rich and exuberant ecosystem of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and collaborating faculty, and people flourished in it both scientifically and personally. Philip advised students like David Orlando from the earliest CBB cohorts, and continued to mentor and guide CBB students in his lab during his 20+ years at Duke, including current CBB student Sarah Van Dierdonck.
Philip Benfey was a friend to CBB and a friend to the people of CBB. The CBB community celebrates his significant impact even as it deeply mourns his passing and offers its condolences to his family and all those who loved him, as we did. Requiescat in pace.