Education
Stormo initially majored in physics as an undergraduate at the, but switched to biology in his junior year. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biology in 1981 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Stormo initially majored in physics as an undergraduate at the, but switched to biology in his junior year. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biology in 1981 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He is considered as one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in deoxyribonucleic acid and Ribonucleic acid, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression. Stormo"s research combines experimental and computational approaches to understand regulation of gene expression.
His experimental work focuses on protein–deoxyribonucleic acid interactions and their role in gene regulation.
His computational work involves analysis of these interactions and developing pattern recognition algorithms to discover regulatory sites in deoxyribonucleic acid and Ribonucleic acid. In 1982, Stormo and his colleagues introduced the Position Weight Matrix (PWM), a now commonly used representation of motifs (patterns) in biological sequences. Consensus sequences had previously been used to represent patterns in biological sequences, but had difficulties in the prediction of new occurrences of these patterns.
The first use of PWMs was in the discovery of Ribonucleic acid sites that function as translation initiation sites. The advantages of PWMs over consensus sequences have made PWMs a popular method for representing patterns in biological sequences and an essential component in modern algorithms for motif discovery.
He has published over 150 scientific papers.
Stormo served on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) from 2000 to 2004 and was honoured as an ISCB Fellow in 2010. He was elected as a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2001. Stormo was Executive Editor of the journal Bioinformatics from 1994 to 1999.
In 2014, he was appointed one of the first Honorary Editors of Bioinformatics.
Stormo has also served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal PLOS Computational Biology. He is currently co-editor of the journal Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.