2006 Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture: Whole Genome Optical Mapping

04-13-2006

Michael S. Waterman, Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Science is the invited speaker for the Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture held on Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 4:30pm in MATH 175.The title of his talk was "Whole Genome Optical Mapping." A reception followed the seminar at 5:30pm in the Mathematical Sciences Library Lounge.

Michael S. Waterman holds an Endowed Associates Chair at the University of Southern California (USC). He started at USC in 1982 after positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University. He has a bachelors in Mathematics from Oregon State University, and a Ph.D. in Statistics and Probability from Michigan State University. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995), was elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences (1995), and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2001). Also he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has held visiting positions at the University of Hawaii (1979-80), the University of California at San Francisco (1982), Mt. Sinai Medical School (1988), Chalmers University (2000), and in 2000-2001 he held the Aisenstadt Chair at University of Montreal. He is Professor-at-large at the Keck Graduate Institute of Life Sciences and in Fall 2000 he became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. In 2002, he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 2005 he was elected to the French Academie des Sciences.

Professor Waterman works in the area of Computational Biology, concentrating on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping. He is a founding editor of Journal of Computational Biology, is on the editorial board of seven journals, and is co-author of the texts Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction and Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes.

The Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture is named in memory of Myra Samuels.