Ruth Nussinov (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

: פרופסור רות נוסינוב) is an Israeli-American biologist who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. T ...

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U ...

. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief for the journal ''

PLOS Computational Biology ''PLOS Computational Biology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering computational biology. It was established in 2005 by the Public Library of Science in association with the International Society for Computational B ...

''. Nussinov proposed the first dynamic programming approach for nucleic acid secondary structure prediction, this method is now known as the

Nussinov algorithm The Nussinov algorithm is a nucleic acid structure prediction algorithm used in computational biology to predict the folding of an RNA molecule that makes use of dynamic programming principles. The algorithm was developed by Ruth Nussinov in the ...

Career

Ruth Nussinov received her B.Sc in

Microbiology Microbiology () is the scientific study of microorganisms, those being unicellular (single cell), multicellular (cell colony), or acellular (lacking cells). Microbiology encompasses numerous sub-disciplines including virology, bacteriology, ...

from

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

in 1966, her M.Sc in

Biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology ...

from

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and wa ...

in 1967 and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Rutgers in 1977. Her thesis was titled ''Secondary structure analysis of nucleic acids''. She was a fellow at the

Weizmann Institute The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli un ...

and worked as a visiting scientist at Berkeley and at Harvard. She took a position at

in 1985 as Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 1990. Besides her work on nucleic acid secondary structure prediction, Nussinov is also regarded as a pioneer in DNA sequence analysis for her work in the early 1980s. Nussinov has authored over 500 scientific papers and is the Editor in Chief of the journal ''

''. She also serves on the editorial boards of the journals ''

Physical Biology ''Physical Biology'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by IOP Publishing covering a range of fields that bridge the biological and physical sciences, including biophysics, systems biology, population dynamics, etc. The editor-in-c ...

'', ''

Proteins Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respondi ...

'',

BMC Bioinformatics ''BMC Bioinformatics'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering bioinformatics and computational biology published by BioMed Central. It was established in 2000, and has been one of the fastest growing and most successful journa ...

and the ''

Journal of Biological Chemistry The ''Journal of Biological Chemistry'' (''JBC'') is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1905., jbc.org Since 1925, it is published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. It covers research i ...

''.

Awards

Nussinov was made a Fellow of the

Biophysical Society The Biophysical Society is an international scientific society whose purpose is to lead the development and dissemination of knowledge in biophysics. Founded in 1958, the Society currently consists of over 7,500 members in academia, government, an ...

in 2011, for her "extraordinary contributions to advances in

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

on both nucleic acids and proteins". She became a Fellow of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

(ISCB) in 2013. In 2018, Nussinov was awarded the

ISCB Senior Scientist Award The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award is an annual prize awarded by the International Society for Computational Biology for contributions to the field of computational biology. Laureates *2021 - Peer Bork *2020 - Steven Salzberg *2019 ...

. In 2020, Nussinov was elected

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the American Physical Society.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nussinov, Ruth Living people Israeli bioinformaticians Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Year of birth missing (living people) University of Washington alumni Rutgers University alumni Tel Aviv University faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society