Philip E. Bourne, a computational biologist and professor with the University of California, San Diego, is this year’s recipient of Microsoft’s Jim Gray eScience Award, for his contributions to data-intensive computing. “Phil's contributions to open access in bioinformatics and computational biology are legion, and are exactly the sort of groundbreaking accomplishments in data-intensive science that we celebrate with the Jim Gray Award,” said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, in a corporate blog this week following the announcement. “In particular, Phil's role as the founding editor-in-chief of the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology has significantly advanced open access in mathematical and computational biology.”