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April 2006
David Haussler (PhD 1982) was recently
elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Haussler was among
72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 16 countries who were elected
in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original
research. The election was held during the business session of the 143rd
annual meeting of the Academy.
"Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in American
science and engineering," said Ralph Cicerone, president of
the Academy. Barbara Schaal, an NAS vice president, noted,
"This year's new class represents outstanding accomplishment in a wide variety
of disciplines."
Haussler was on the computer science faculty at the University of California at
Santa Cruz when he introduced hidden Markov models for protein sequence
analysis, developed a kernel function from the profiles to be used in support
vector machine training, and played a leading role in assembling the human
genome sequence. His work became a key component of the international
collaboration to complete the reference sequence, and his research group has
made continuing contributions to the discovery of information in the sequence,
such as finding the genes and characterizing the evolutionary properties
uncovered by comparing the mouse and human sequences.
Haussler is currently a professor of bio-molecular engineering at UC-Santa Cruz,
an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a consulting professor
for the Stanford Medical School and the University of California San Francisco
Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department, a fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI), member of the nominating committee for the International
Society for Computational Biology and a member of the American Society of Human
Genetics. He also holds the UC Presidential Chair in Computer Science at the
Santa Cruz campus. Haussler was presented the
Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award
in the area of Research and Invention by the College of Engineering and
Applied Science in 2005.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and
engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general
welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation
signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official
adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or
technology.
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