Eugene Myers

Last updated
Eugene Myers
Gene Myers ISMB 2014.jpg
Myers speaking at ISMB 2014
Born
Eugene Wimberly Myers

(1953-12-31) December 31, 1953 (age 70)
Alma mater University of Colorado at Boulder
Caltech
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Bioinformatics
Institutions MPI-CBG
Janelia Farm Research Campus
University of Arizona
Thesis A Depth-First search characterization of K-connectivity and its application to connectivity testing  (1982)
Doctoral advisor Andrzej Ehrenfeucht [2]
Website www.mpi-cbg.de/research-groups/current-groups/gene-myers/

Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.

Contents

Education

Myers received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Colorado.

Research

Myers' 1990 paper (with Stephen Altschul and others [3] ) describing BLAST has received over 62,000+ citations [4] making it amongst the most highly cited papers ever. Along with Udi Manber, Myers invented the suffix array data structure. [5]

Myers was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona, the Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics, and a member of the faculty at UC Berkeley. At Celera Genomics, Myers was involved in the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of Drosophila and mouse. In particular, Myers advocated the use of the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique. Later, he became group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. [6] In 2012, Myers moved to Dresden to become one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He leads a center for systems biology. [7]

Myers' current research interests include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data, and genome assembly. [8] Among his latest contributions is FASTK, a highly optimized kmer counter for high-fidelity shotgun read datasets. [9]

Myers was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004, together with Martin Vingron, Myers was awarded the Max Planck Research Prize for international cooperation in bioinformatics. [10] He was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for outstanding contribution to bioinformatics, in particular his work on sequence comparison algorithms. [11]

Awards and honours

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computational biology</span> Branch of biology

Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has foundations in applied mathematics, chemistry, and genetics. It differs from biological computing, a subfield of computer science and engineering which uses bioengineering to build computers.

The Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics is a research institute for molecular genetics based in Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Max Planck Institute network of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human Genome Project</span> Human genome sequencing programme

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2006. It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project started after it was adopted in 1984 by the US government, and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on April 14, 2003, and included about 92% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021, with a remaining only 0.3% bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David J. Lipman</span> American biologist

David J. Lipman is an American biologist who from 1989 to 2017 was the director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health. NCBI is the home of GenBank, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in bioinformatics. In 2017, he left NCBI and became Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Salzberg</span> American biologist and computer scientist

Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webb Miller</span> American bioinformatician

Webb Colby Miller is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Søren Brunak</span> Danish bioinformatics professor, scientist

Søren Brunak is a Danish biological and physical scientist working in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical informatics. He is a professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen and professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. As Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, he leads a research effort where molecular-level systems biology data are combined with phenotypic data from the healthcare sector, such as electronic patient records, registry information, and biobank questionnaires. A major aim is to understand the network biology basis for time-ordered comorbidities and discriminate between treatment-related disease correlations and other comorbidities in disease trajectories. Søren Brunak also holds a position as a Medical Informatics Officer at Rigshospitalet, the Capital Region of Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Society for Computational Biology</span> Scholarly society

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference and has grown to become a larger society working towards advancing understanding of living systems through computation and for communicating scientific advances worldwide.

Mark Borodovsky is a Regents' Professor at the Join Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech. He has also been a Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia from 2012 to 2022.

The ISCB Overton Prize is a computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biology either through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.

The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award is an annual prize awarded by the International Society for Computational Biology for contributions to the field of computational biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pavel A. Pevzner</span> Russian-born American professor of computational mass spectrometry

Pavel Arkadevich Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science and director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego. He serves on the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology and he is a member of the Genome Institute of Singapore scientific advisory board.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ziv Bar-Joseph</span> Israeli computational biologist

Ziv Bar-Joseph is an Israeli computational biologist and Professor in the Computational Biology Department and the Machine Learning Department at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Vingron</span> Austrian mathematician

Martin Vingron is an Austrian mathematician working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. Since 2000, he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Kelso</span> South African bioinformatician

Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present.

The ISCB Innovator Award is a computational biology prize awarded annually to leading scientists who are within two decades post-degree, who consistently make outstanding contributions to the field, and who continue to forge new directions. The prize was established by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2016 and is awarded at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference. The inaugural recipient was Serafim Batzoglou.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Núria López Bigas</span> Researcher on computational cancer genomics

Núria López Bigas is a Spanish biologist and research professor with expertise in medical genetics, computational biology, and bioinformatics. She is an ICREA professor at Pompeu Fabra University and she also leads the Biomedical Genomics Research Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain. Her research is focused on developing computational approaches to investigate cancer genomes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christoph Bock</span> German bioinformatician and principal investigator

Christoph Bock is a German bioinformatician and principal investigator at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a visiting professor at the Medical University of Vienna.

Vineet Bafna is an Indian bioinformatician and professor of computer science and director of bioinformatics program at University of California, San Diego. He was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. He has also been a member of the Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) conference steering committee.

Biomedical data science is a multidisciplinary field which leverages large volumes of data to promote biomedical innovation and discovery. Biomedical data science draws from various fields including Biostatistics, Biomedical informatics, and machine learning, with the goal of understanding biological and medical data. It can be viewed as the study and application of data science to solve biomedical problems. Modern biomedical datasets often have specific features which make their analyses difficult, including:

References

  1. 1 2 Fogg, C. N.; Kovats, D. E. (2014). "2014 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Gene Myers". PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (5): e1003621. Bibcode:2014PLSCB..10E3621F. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003621 . PMC   4031058 . PMID   24853264.
  2. Eugene Myers at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Altschul, S.; Gish, W.; Miller, W.; Myers, E.; Lipman, D. (1990). "Basic Local Alignment Search Tool". Journal of Molecular Biology. 215 (3): 403–410. doi:10.1016/S0022-2836(05)80360-2. PMID   2231712. S2CID   14441902.
  4. Eugene Myers publications indexed by Google Scholar
  5. Manber, U.; Myers, G. (1993). "Suffix Arrays: A New Method for On-Line String Searches". SIAM J. Comput. 22 (5): 935–948. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.105.6571 . doi:10.1137/0222058. S2CID   5074629.
  6. Gene Myers' Home Page
  7. "Eugene Myers will lead new Systems Biology Center". Max Planck Society. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  8. Twitter feed
  9. "GitHub - thegenemyers/FASTK: A fast K-mer counter for high-fidelity shotgun datasets". GitHub. Retrieved 2021-08-27.
  10. "2004 Max Planck Research Prize for Martin Vingron and Eugene W. Myers". www.mpg.de. Retrieved 7 September 2016.
  11. "Gene Myers and Dana Pe'er Named 2014 ISCB Award Winners". www.iscb.org. ISCB. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
  12. "Current IEEE Corporate Award Recipients". IEEE Awards. Retrieved 2021-11-29.
  13. "Milner Award". Royal Society. Retrieved 6 September 2018.