Michael Waterman
Michael S. Waterman ( born June 28, 1942 in Coquille, Oregon) is an American pioneer of bioinformatics.
Waterman grew up in Bandon (Oregon ) and studied mathematics at Oregon State University with a bachelor's degree in 1964 and master's degree (MS ) in 1966. 1968 he received his Master's degree (MA) at Michigan State University, where he in 1969 with John Kinney received his doctorate in probability theory ( Some ergodic properties of Multi- Dimensional F- Expansions ). He studied statistical properties of the iteration of functions with the computer, which also led to the first invitations to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In Los Alamos he also met Temple Smith, who led him to bioinformatics. Under the head of the laboratory Charles DeLisi, they developed algorithms for sequence alignment and RNA folding. From 1969 he was assistant professor and later associate professor at the University of Idaho. 1975 to 1981 he was at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. 1979/80 he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii and 1982 at the Medical School of the University of California, San Francisco. From 1982 he was professor of biology, mathematics and computer science at the University of Southern California.
Waterman is responsible for some of the basic algorithms used for genome sequencing. In 1981 he developed with Temple F. Smith the Smith -Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison. In 1988 he published with Eric Lander, a fundamental work on the theory of sequencing, the wide application found for example in the Human Genome Project. The mid-1980s he was also search with Gary Stormo and others a pioneer in the development of algorithms that patterns ( motifs) in DNA.
In addition, he also dealt with ergodic theory and algorithmic number theory.
In 2002 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award. In 1995 he was Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2001) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995). He became a member of the Academie des Sciences in 2005. The Tel Aviv University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.
Writings
- Introduction to computational biology, Chapman Hall 1995