Eugene Myers

Eugene Myers

Gene Myers speaking at ISMB 2014
Born Eugene Wimberly Myers
December 1953 (age 62)
Boise, Idaho
Nationality United States
Fields Computer science
Bioinformatics
Institutions MPI-CBG
Janelia Farm Research Campus
University of Arizona
Alma mater University of Colorado at Boulder
Caltech
Thesis A Depth-First search characterization of K-connectivity and its application to connectivity testing (1982)
Doctoral advisor Andrzej Ehrenfeucht[1]
Doctoral students John Kececioglu[1]
Notable awards
Website
www.mpi-cbg.de/research/research-groups/gene-myers.html

Eugene "Gene" Wimberly Myers, Jr. (born 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.

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

His 1990 paper (with Stephen Altschul and others[3]) describing BLAST has received over 41,000 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 will lead a new center for systems biology.[7]

His current research interests include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data, and genome assembly.[8]

Gene 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 he won the International Max-Planck Research Prize. He was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for outstanding contribution to bioinformatics, in particular his work on sequence comparison algorithms.[9]

Awards and honours

References

  1. 1 2 Eugene Myers at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. 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. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003621. PMID 24853264.
  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.
  4. Eugene Myers's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a service provided by Google
  5. Manber, U.; Myers, G. (1993). "Suffix Arrays: A New Method for On-Line String Searches". SIAM J. Comput. 22 (5): 935–948. doi:10.1137/0222058.
  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. "Gene Myers and Dana Pe'er Named 2014 ISCB Award Winners". www.iscb.org. ISCB. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
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