Background
He grew up near Bandon, Oregon and earned a bachelor"s degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University, followed by a doctorate in statistics and probability from Michigan State University in 1969.
biologist mathematician university professor
He grew up near Bandon, Oregon and earned a bachelor"s degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University, followed by a doctorate in statistics and probability from Michigan State University in 1969.
Oregon State University. Michigan State University.
He previously held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University. Waterman is one of the founders and current leaders in the area of computational biology. He focuses on applying mathematics, statistics, and computer science techniques to various problems in molecular biology.
His work has contributed to some of the most widely used tools in the field
In particular, the Smith-Waterman algorithm (developed with Temple Smith) is the basis for many sequence comparison programs. In 1988, Waterman and Eric Lander published a landmark paper describing a mathematical model for fingerprint mapping.
This work formed one of the theoretical cornerstones for many of the later deoxyribonucleic acid mapping and sequencing projects, especially the Human Genome Project. A 1995 paper by Idury and Waterman introduced Eulerian-De Bruijn sequence assembly which is widely used in next-generation sequencing projects.
With Istrail and Pevzner, he began the international conference Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), and he is a founding editor of the Journal of Computational Biology.
He was elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 1995, and elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001. Since 2005, he is an elected Academician of the French Académie des Sciences. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2012.
Waterman also authored one of the earliest textbooks in the field: Introduction to Computational Biology.
National Academy of Sciences. Chinese Academy of Sciences.