For the former MTV news/current CBS news correspondent, see Serena Altschul.
| Stephen Frank Altschul | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 28, 1957 |
| Citizenship | United states |
| Fields | Bioinformatics |
| Institutions | NCBI |
| Doctoral advisor | Daniel Kleitman |
| Known for | BLAST |
Stephen Frank Altschul (born February 28, 1957) is an American mathematician who has designed algorithms that are widely used in the field of bioinformatics (the Karlin-Altschul algorithm[1]). Most notably, Altschul is the co-author of the BLAST algorithm used for sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides. He graduated summa cum laude[2] from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and has a Ph.D. in the same field of research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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During his undergraduate years, Dr. Altschul developed an interest in Biology. As a result, he started reading books about DNA. One of the books which he read was "The Double Helix" by Watson. Furthermore, he had also taken course on Evolutionary Biology. Dr. Altschul had also spent two summers working in laboratories at Rockfeller University where he helped to write computer codes for a X-ray crystallography project.
Due to his interest, Dr. Altschul had considered trying to apply to graduate school in Biology. He instead decided to apply to programs in applied mathematics, with the hope of finding some applications of mathematics to biology to work on.
Upon graduation, Dr. Stephen Frank Altschul worked in the Mathematics Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases as a IRTA postdoctoral fellowship.From 1990 to present, he works in NCBI Computational Biology Branch, holding the position of senior investigator.
His research interest is centered around sequence alignment algorithms, statistics of sequence comparison and measurement of sequence similarity.