| Eugene Myers | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Computer science Bioinformatics |
| Institutions | University of Arizona |
| Alma mater | University of Colorado at Boulder Caltech |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrzej Ehrenfeucht |
| Doctoral students | John Kececioglu |
| Notable awards | Kanellakis Award (1981) |
Eugene "Gene" Wimberly Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for his development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. His 1990 paper (with Stephen Altschul and others) describing BLAST has received over 24000 citations[1] making it among the most highly cited papers ever. He is currently a group leader at the Janelia Farm research campus (JFRC) of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[2] Before joining the Janelia Farm, he was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona, the Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics, and a member of the faculty at UC Berkeley. His current research interests at JFRC include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, as well as algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data.
Gene Myers received a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Colorado.
Myers was one of the original developers of the BLAST algorithm, which is very likely the most widely used software tool in the field of bioinformatics. Along with Udi Manber, Myers invented the suffix array data structure.
Before coming to Berkeley in 2003, Myers worked at Celera Genomics, where he was involved in the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of Drosophila and mouse. In particular, Myers advocated the use of the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique.
Gene was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004 he won the International Max-Planck Research Prize.
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