Stephen Altschul

Altschul, whose father was a partner at Goldman Sachs and CEO of General American Investors Company, studied mathematics at Harvard University (Bachelor in 1979 summa cum laude), then taught for two years in Rome and received his PhD in 1987 at Daniel J. Kleitman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( Aspects of Biological Sequence Comparison ). His doctoral thesis was on Gensequenzvergleiche what he worked with Bruce Erickson and Peter Sellers of The Rockefeller University. He was then at the National Institutes of Health in the National Center for Biotechnology Information ( NCBI), where he worked with Eugene Myers ( of the University of Arizona was a visiting scholar at the NCBI ), David J. Lipman ( the former NCBI director, who also 1985 FASTA algorithm developed ) Warren Gish (which the majority of the implementation made ​​) and Webb Miller BLAST algorithm developed for sequence comparison. Their work from 1990 was the most cited scientific work of the 1990s. In the development of sequencing algorithms he also worked with Samuel Karlin. In 1997 he published with employees an enhanced version ( Gapped BLAST, PSI -BLAST ) .. He is a group leader at the NCBI in Bethesda (Maryland).