Richard LathropRichard Lathrop Prof. Lathrop received his B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College and his S.M. in Computer Science, E.E. in Electrical Engineering, and Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from MIT. He was a research scientist at the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory before joining the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he is now a Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (DBSICS). His research involves applying advanced computation and intelligent systems to problems in biology and medicine. He was a co-founder of Arris Pharmaceutical Corp. (subsequently Axys Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; now part of Celera Genomics Group); a co-founder of CODA Genomics, Inc. (now Verdezyne, Inc.); a co-founder of Actavalon, Inc.; and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of CombiChem, Inc. (now part of DuPont Pharmaceuticals Research Laboratories), and Geneformatics, Inc. He has received Best Paper Awards from the Intl. Conf. on Genome Informatics and the ACM/IEEE Intl. Design Automation Conf.; an Innovative Application Award from the AAAI/IAAI Conf.; a Graduate Fellowship and a CAREER grant award from the National Science Foundation; an Innovation Award from UCI; and a Research Award for Discovery from the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a co-inventor on US Patents No. 5,526,281 (“Machine Learning Approach to Modeling Biological Activity for Molecular Design and to Modeling Other Characteristics”) and No. 7,262,031 (“Method for Producing a Synthetic Gene or Other DNA Sequence”). He proved that protein threading is NP-complete and the Halting Problem is formally learnable. His research has been on the cover of AI Magazine, J. of Molecular Biology, and Communications of the ACM.
Prof. Lathrop was the founding Treasurer of the Intl. Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and currently serves on their Board of Directors. As Chair of the ISCB Public Affairs Committee he oversaw the development and adoption of the “ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature.” He was Guest Editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems special issue on “Intelligent Systems and Molecular Biology I & II.” He was Chair of the NIH “BioData Management and Analysis” study section and also Chair of the NIH special review panel on “Big Data to Knowledge: Targeted Software.” He has served on numerous Organizing and Program Committees of the ISMB Conference. He is a Life Member of AAAI and ISCB.
Prof. Lathrop has been named “UCI Professor of the Year” at the annual UCI Celebration of Teaching. He has been awarded the UCI Chancellor’s Award for Fostering Undergraduate Research; the DBSICS Dean’s award for Excellence in Teaching; the UCI Excellence in Teaching Award for undergraduate teaching; and the ICS Department Outstanding Faculty Award for research and teaching. He is Director of the undergraduate Honors Program for DBSICS and serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. On a scale where 6 is Very Good and 9 is Excellent, student evaluation of teaching in his lecture classes uniformly scores a median of between 8 and 9 on “What overall evaluation would you give this instructor?”
Copied from: https://ics.uci.edu/~rickl/Lathrop_short_bio.pdf
| A tribute page for Rick made by Tandy Warnow is available here: http://tandy.cs.illinois.edu/lathrop.html - ISCB |
| I knew Rick both personally and professionally. He was a very kind and generous person. He gave me great advice when I was becoming Chair of BDMA, and was a good friend to my family. It is sad that we won’t see him again. - Tandy Warnow |
| Deaths are like bells that ring out passing time. They serve as a time for thinking back to old memories. The many lovely comments in this stream, which I am only reading having just awoken in Seoul, make such thoughts all the more vivid. I remember Rick well perhaps because we lived in Lathrop Drive in Stanford. Wanting more clarity I searched emails, which I have kept since the 1980’s (BitMail I think it was called). My first mention of Rick is from Russ Altman and concerns ISMB in Nov. 1994. A few months later Rick & I met at the fist PMMB Sante Fe Meeting. In August 1986 he lectured at Stanford with the prescient abstract: “ In recent years Artificial Intelligence has found a rich application domain in molecular biology. The domain offers large on-line databases, interested and supportive domain practitioners, an accessible domain theory and vocabulary, and a great many difficult and important problems. In this talk I will survey the domain and its opportunities for AI, discuss three case studies in AI and molecular biology that I have been involved with, and make suggestions for AI practitioners interested in working in this fascinating area.” Rick was a real pioneer of the glory days we now enjoy. May his memory endure for our ever. - Michael Levitt |
| Rick's birthday is today. October 20. Happy Birthday Rick. See you on the other side. - Anonymous |
| I did have the privilege to met Rick Lathrop, when I join the group of Temple Smith, first at the molecular biology computer research resource (mbcrr, DFCI-Harvard), and then at BMERC (BU). Rick (with Terry Webster and Temple) had just published Ariadne--a pioneering work on the application of AI to molecular biology, specifically to protein structure prediction. Rick was a deep, very inteligent thinker. But also very kind and generous--a great human being. This is a sad loss - Anonymous |