Webb Colby Miller (born 1943) is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at

The Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855 as Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Pe ...

Education

Miller attended

Whitman College Whitman College is a private liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington. The school offers 53 majors and 33 minors in the liberal arts and sciences, and it has a student-to-faculty ratio of 9:1. Founded as a seminary by a territorial l ...

, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

in 1969.

Research and career

He joined

Penn State #Redirect Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with ca ...

in September 1985. Prior to that, he had held a position as permanent staff member at the

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

and served on the faculty at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

, and the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

. He is a fellow of the ISCB (

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 Mo ...

). Miller has been developing algorithms and software for analyzing DNA sequences and related types of data from molecular genetics. He is one of the authors of BLAST. He also develops methods for aligning long DNA sequences and extracting functional information from them. Webb Miller has made important contributions to the analysis of many vertebrate genomes. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

. Webb Miller's recent research interests include the bioinformatics of species extinction, collaborating with Stephan Schuster, who is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State. In November 2008, they published a paper in

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

that described a draft sequence for the

woolly mammoth The woolly mammoth (''Mammuthus primigenius'') is an extinct species of mammoth that lived from the Middle Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with the African ...

genome.

Awards

Miller was awarded the ISCB Senior Scientist Award and elected an ISCB Fellow by the

in 2009. He is also among The 2009

Time 100 ''Time'' 100 is a list of the top 100 most influential people, assembled by the American news magazine ''Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, politicians, and journalists, the list is now a highly ...

. Together with Gene Myers, he received the Inaugural IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal "for pioneering contributions to sequence analysis algorithms and their applications to biosequence search, genome sequencing, and comparative genome analyses".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Webb American bioinformaticians Pennsylvania State University faculty Living people University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty University of Arizona faculty Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology 1943 births