Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.

Education

Myers received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Colorado.

Research

Myers' 1990 paper (with Stephen Altschul and others) describing BLAST has received over 62,000+ citations making it amongst the most highly cited papers ever. Along with Udi Manber, Myers invented the

suffix array In computer science, a suffix array is a sorted array of all suffixes of a string. It is a data structure used in, among others, full-text indices, data-compression algorithms, and the field of bibliometrics. Suffix arrays were introduced by as ...

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

. Myers 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. At Celera Genomics, Myers was involved in the

sequencing In genetics and biochemistry, sequencing means to determine the primary structure (sometimes incorrectly called the primary sequence) of an unbranched biopolymer. Sequencing results in a symbolic linear depiction known as a sequence which succ ...

of the human genome, as well as the genomes of '' Drosophila'' and

mouse A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...

. In particular, Myers advocated the use of the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique. Later, he became group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) of the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

. In 2012, Myers moved to Dresden to become one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He leads a center for

systems biology Systems biology is the computational modeling, computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological syst ...

. Myers' current research interests include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data, and genome assembly. Among his latest contributions is FASTK, a highly optimized kmer counter for high-fidelity shotgun read datasets. Myers 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, together with Martin Vingron, Myers was awarded the

Max Planck Research Prize Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE) * Max (gorilla) (1 ...

for international cooperation in bioinformatics. He was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for outstanding contribution to bioinformatics, in particular his work on sequence comparison algorithms.

Awards and honours

*2022: IEEE

Frances E. Allen Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932August 4, 2020) was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing ...

Medal (with Webb Miller) *2019: Milner Award by the Royal Society *2014: Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award by the International Society for Computational Biology *2004: International Max Planck Research Prize *2003: Elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering. *2001: Paris Kanellakis Award by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Myers, Eugene Living people 1953 births American bioinformaticians California Institute of Technology alumni Human Genome Project scientists University of Colorado alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty University of Arizona faculty Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Max Planck Institute directors