Professor Dr Eugene W. Myers

In the mid 1980s Eugene Myers developed fundamental algorithmic methods for string matching and computational biology. In 1990 he developed a sublinear algorithm for approximate matching whose core concepts were implemented in heuristic form in a program called BLAST that compares any biological sequence with those in the public biosequence databases. It has become the most widely used tool in bioinformatics and was the most cited paper in the science literature for several years.
In 1998 he joined Celera Genomics Corporation to sequence the entire human genome using the revolutionary paired-end whole-genome shotgun sequencing protocol he proposed with Jim Weber in 1996. While there he developed algorithms that successfully assembled data for the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes in a 3 year period.
All of his efforts now focus on building 3D and 4D “atlases” of brains, developing organisms and cellular processes with light and electron microscopy.