Michael Levitt, is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". In 2018, Levitt was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
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.
Temple Ferris Smith is an emeritus professor in biomedical engineering who helped to develop the Smith-Waterman algorithm with Michael Waterman in 1981. The Smith-Waterman algorithm serves as the basis for multi sequence comparisons, identifying the segment with the maximum local sequence similarity, see sequence alignment. This algorithm is used for identifying similar DNA, RNA and protein segments. He was director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center at Boston University for twenty years and is now professor emeritus.
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.
DNA sequencing theory is the broad body of work that attempts to lay analytical foundations for determining the order of specific nucleotides in a sequence of DNA, otherwise known as DNA sequencing. The practical aspects revolve around designing and optimizing sequencing projects, predicting project performance, troubleshooting experimental results, characterizing factors such as sequence bias and the effects of software processing algorithms, and comparing various sequencing methods to one another. In this sense, it could be considered a branch of systems engineering or operations research. The permanent archive of work is primarily mathematical, although numerical calculations are often conducted for particular problems too. DNA sequencing theory addresses physical processes related to sequencing DNA and should not be confused with theories of analyzing resultant DNA sequences, e.g. sequence alignment. Publications sometimes do not make a careful distinction, but the latter are primarily concerned with algorithmic issues. Sequencing theory is based on elements of mathematics, biology, and systems engineering, so it is highly interdisciplinary. The subject may be studied within the context of computational biology.
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.
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.
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words, "Michael Waterman and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.
Mathieu Daniel Blanchette is a computational biologist and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research focuses on developing new algorithms for the detection of functional regions in DNA sequences.
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the head of the Computation and Biology group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Jill P. Mesirov is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and computational biologist who is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She previously held an adjunct faculty position at Boston University and was the associate director and chief informatics officer at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist.
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.
ISCB Fellowship is an award granted to scientists that the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) judges to have made “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. As of 2019, there are 76 Fellows of the ISCB including Michael Ashburner, Alex Bateman, Bonnie Berger, Steven E. Brenner, Janet Kelso, Daphne Koller, Michael Levitt, Sarah Teichmann and Shoshana Wodak. See List of Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology for a comprehensive listing.
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
Mona Singh is the Wang Family Professor in Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology.
Hanah Margalit is a Professor in the faculty of medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research combines bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology, specifically in the fields of gene regulation in bacteria and eukaryotes.
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.
