Future: Bioinformatics

Prof. Michael S. Waterman is Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Science at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California.

Prof. Waterman made seminal and influential contributions to biological sequence analysis. He developed an algorithm that is the basis for the database search and analysis tool used by researchers in all fields for investigating DNA, RNA and protein sequences. He developed the fundamental algorithms used for the mapping of sequence information in the Human Genome Project, for the design of new genome sequencing projects, and for analyzing the results of genome sequencing in terms of alignment, comparison, and RNA secondary structure. Prof. Waterman was influential in the creation of a community of bioinformatics researchers, by co-founding the RECOMB conference series and the Journal of Computational Biology. Prof. Waterman literally wrote the book on the subject, Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences, and Genomes, published in 1995.

Prof. Waterman was named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the National Academy of Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Engineering (2012), an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1991), the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009) and the International Society of Computational Biology (2009). In the fall of 2000, he became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. He received a Gairdner Foundation International Award (2002) and the Friendship Award from the Chinese government (2013). He is an elected Foreign Member of the French Académie des Sciences (2005) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013). He received Doctor Philosophiae Honors Causia from Tel Aviv University (2011) and Southern Denmark University (2013).