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Volume 9, Issue 2
President's Letter
Welcome to ISMB 2006!
Student Council Events
Mathieu Blanchette
Overton Prize
Michael Waterman
Senior Scientist
Accomplishment Award
One Year of
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PLoS CB Education
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Professor Michael Waterman
Recognized As
2006 ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award Winner
Submitted by Merry Maisel, freelance science
writer
Dr.
Michael S. Waterman, Professor of Biological Sciences, Computer
Sciences, and Mathematics at the University of Southern California,
is the 2006 recipient of the Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award
of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Waterman is best known as the developer, with Temple F. Smith, of
the Smith-Waterman algorithm for determining the degree of similarity
(homology) of amino acid sequences from DNA, RNA, or proteins. In
their famous three-page paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology
in 1981, Waterman and Smith changed the face of molecular biology
and helped launch the bioinformatics revolution.
"Ever since, Mike Waterman has contributed work of prime importance
in half a dozen fields of computational biology," says Professor
Thomas Lengauer of the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik and
chair of the ISCB Awards Committee. "In addition to the Smith-Waterman
algorithm and its follow-ons, Waterman introduced the dynamic programming
approach to RNA structure prediction; and he supplied the mathematical,
probabilistic, and statistical underpinning that supports BLAST
and similar alignment search and evaluation tools. In 1988, he and
Eric Lander derived the fundamental formulae to enable the correct
assembly of genome sequences. His recent software for genome assembly,
written with computational scientist Pavel Pevzner of UCSD and mathematician
Haixu Tang of USC, promises to become the standard for the field."
Lengauer adds, "Waterman has had enormous impact on the fields
of bioinformatics, computational genomics, and phylogeny, combining
vision with technical depth, and his influence goes beyond research."
Waterman has trained many prominent computational geneticists, has
served on virtually all the panels and committees advising government
and evaluating major grants and fellowships, and has generally guided
the development of computational biology. "He wrote one of
the first textbooks in this field." Lengauer says," and
his latest text, Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction,
written with Richard C. Deonier and Simon Tavaré, is unique
in successfully addressing the needs of students with very little
background in either biology or computing. With Pavel Pevzner and
Sorin Istrail, Waterman founded RECOMB, the conference on research
in computational molecular biology, which held its tenth conference
in April 2006."
Waterman is a founding editor of the Journal of Computational Biology
and serves on the editorial boards of six other journals. He was
named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995), was elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (1995) and to the National Academy of Sciences
(2001), and is a Fellow of AAAS and the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics. In 2005, he was elected to the French Académie
des Sciences. In addition to his posts as University Professor and
USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences, he is professor-at-large
in the Keck Graduate Institute of Life Sciences and master of USC's
Parkside International Residence College.
The Senior Scientist Achievement Award will be presented to Professor
Waterman on August 10 at the ISCB annual meeting, Intelligent Systems
for Molecular Biology, in Fortaleza, Brazil. Waterman will deliver
the final keynote lecture, "Whole genome optical mapping,"
for the conference.
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