Computational Biology

University Professor Michael Waterman-the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and professor of biological sciences, computer science, and mathematics-is one of the world's foremost computational biologists. The focus of his research is the application of methodologies from mathematics, statistics, and computer science to the study of DNA, RNA, and protein-sequence data.

Codeveloper of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping, he is a founding editor of the Journal of Computational Biology, serves on the editorial board of six other journals, and is coauthor of two landmark textbooks: Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction and Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes.

Waterman was named a Guggenheim Fellow and elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 1995. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and the French Acad\351mie des Sciences in 2005.

Waterman and his research team use HPCC's resources to conduct statistical analyses of microarray data and related technologies, study protein-protein interactions and protein function prediction combining different sources of biological data, and participate in a genomic polymorphism survey of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant of the mustard family that is widely used as a model organism in plant biology.

In Fall 2003, Waterman's team was awarded a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) grant by the National Institutes of Health for work relating to human DNA sequence variation. These data are likely to be a key resource for researchers at tempting to identify genes that affect health, cause disease, and influence the human body's responses to drugs and environmental factors.