Mervyn Young Lecture Series - Haussler and Myers

Discovering the detailed structure of the human genome has enabled studies of the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes, portending many exciting scientific and social developments including personalized medicine and health profiling. Complemented with advances in proteomics (the study of all the proteins in a cell), micro-array expression analysis, and both light and electron microscopy, we are beginning to understand how the program of the genome is executed. Progress is accelerating, making this a very exciting frontier of science.

In this talk for a general audience, prominent genome researchers Eugene Myers and David Haussler will present personal perspectives on this area of research. They'll share their ideas about the most important implications of the work, and what developments we should expect over the next few decades.

David Haussler is an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he holds the UC Presidential Chair in Computer Science at the Santa Cruz campus, he is 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 is a past chairman of the Steering Committee for the Computational Learning Theory Conferences (COLT), an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computational Biology, and was an action editor for the journal Machine Learning. He is currently Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UCSC and scientific co-director of the multi-campus Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research at USCF, UCB and UCSC. Haussler holds a BA in Mathematics from Connecticut College, an MS in Applied Mathematics from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Eugene Myers joined the faculty of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley at the start of 2003. He was formerly Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics for four years where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996. Prior to that Gene was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 18 years and he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1981. His research interests include design of algorithms, pattern matching, computer graphics, and computational molecular biology. His most recent academic work has focused on algorithms for the central combinatorial problems involved in DNA sequencing, and on a wide range of sequence and pattern comparison problems. Among the tools he has developed are BLAST -- a widely used tool for protein similarity searches, FAKtory -- a system to support DNA sequencing projects, Anrep -- a pattern matching language for applications in molecular biology, and Mac- and PC-Molecule -- a molecular visualization tool for Apple and Wintel computers. He was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Achievement Award in 2000, the Newcomb Cleveland Best Paper in Science award in 2001, and the ACM Kanellakis Prize in 2002. He was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

The Mervyn Young Memorial Lecture Series on Computing Technology and Society addresses the relationship between innovation in computing technology and changes in society. Established by a 1952 alumnus of the College's Engineering Physics program, the series is co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science and the College of Engineering and Applied Science. The speakers are leaders from industry and distinguished academics.