Education
Altschul graduated summa cum laude from, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and has a Doctor of Philosophy in the same field from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Altschul graduated summa cum laude from, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and has a Doctor of Philosophy in the same field from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Altschul is the co-author of the BLAST algorithm used for sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides. His research interest is centered on sequence alignment algorithms, statistics of sequence comparison and measurement of sequence similarity. During his undergraduate years, Doctor Altschul developed an interest in biology.
As a result, he started reading books about deoxyribonucleic acid. Furthermore, he had also taken a course on Evolutionary Biology.
Doctor Altschul had also spent two summers working in laboratories at Rockfeller University where he helped to write computer codes for a X-ray crystallography project Due to his interest, Doctor Altschul had considered trying to apply to graduate school in biology.
He instead decided to apply to programs in applied mathematics, with the hope of finding some applications of mathematics to biology to work on. Upon graduation, Doctor Stephen Frank Altschul worked in the Mathematics Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases as an IRTA postdoctoral fellowship.
From 1990 to present, he has worked in the NCBI Computational Biology Branch, holding the position of senior investigator.
On his father"s side, he is a member of the Lehman family.