Computer Scientist Elected Fellow of International Society for Computational Biology
San Diego, July 11, 2012 -- Computer scientist Pavel Pevzner from the University of California, San Diego, has been elected as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, along with six other researchers from other institutions.
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The ISCB Fellows program honors members that have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. They will be recognized for their contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics at the ISCB members meeting July 15 during the society's 20th anniversary annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology in Long Beach, Calif.
Pevzner, who holds the Ronald R. Taylor Chair in Computer Science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, is a leading authority on using computer science to decipher and analyze genomes and proteomes. He made fundamental contributions in various areas of bioinformatics including the study of genome rearrangements, computational proteomics and DNA sequencing. Recently, he has helped develop a new single cell sequencing algorithm to sequence and analyze the dark matter of life—the genomes of thousands of bacteria species previously beyond scientists’ reach, from microorganisms that produce antibiotics and biofuels to microbes living in the human body.
As the director of the Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at UC San Diego, Pevzner is actively involved in developing new approaches to bioinformatics education. He co-authored three textbooks: “Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach” (2000), “Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms” (2004) and “Bioinformatics for Biologists” (2011). In 2006 he was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor for his contribution to bioinformatics education.
The International Society for Computational Biology is a not-for-profit scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. Based in La Jolla, California, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the UC San Diego campus, the ISCB has a global membership of nearly 3,000 researchers from 70 countries.
In addition to Pevzner, the ISCB Fellows Class of 2012 includes a frequent visitor to UC San Diego and Calit2: Ron Shamir, of Tel Aviv University, a regular attendee at Calit2's Information Theory and Applications Workshop. Other honorees in 2012 include:
Bonnie Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peter Karp, SRI International
Jill Mesirov, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Martin Vingron, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics
Gunnar von Heijne, Stockholm University
"ISCB Fellows represent the absolute pillars of our community,” said ISCB President Burkhard Rost.
Each of these very accomplished researchers has made exceptional contributions to the ISCB's mission to advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation, he said. "I can imagine that the ISCB Fellows will become an active group of the Society, serving as a pool of experts that can help drive the scientific excellence of our field,” Rost added.
Related Links
ISCB News Release
International Society for Computational Biology
UCSD Computer Science and Engineering
Media Contacts
Ioana Patringenaru, Jacobs School of Engineering, 858-822-0899, ipatrin@ucsd.edu