Dr. Gusfield’s primary interests involve the efficiency of algorithms, particularly for problems in combinatorial optimization and graph theory. These algorithms have been applied to study data security, stable matching, network flow, matroid optimization, string/pattern matching problems, molecular sequence analysis and optimization problems in population-scale genomics. Currently, he is focused on string and combinatorial problems that arise in computational biology and bioinformatics. Dr. Gusfield served as chair of the computer science department at UC Davis from July 2000 until August 2004, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of The IEEE/ACM Transactions of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics until January 2009.

Evan Eichler is a Professor of Genome Sciences and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received his Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine. After his postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he joined Case Western Reserve University in 1997 and the University of Washington in 2004. His research group provided the first genome-wide view of segmental duplications within human and primate genomes. He is a leader in identifying and sequencing normal and disease-causing structural variation and applied long-read sequencing to generate the first telomere-to-telomere (T2T) human genome.

Iman Hajirasouliha is Associate Professor of Computational Genomics at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine of Cornell University. His research focuses on AI in Medicine with applications to Cancer and Women’s Health, Computational Genomics, Metagenomics and Pangenomes. Iman received a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship, an NIGMS Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, and a Hirschl and Weill-Caulier Research Award. He serves on the program committee of several bioinformatics conferences, including ISMB and RECOMB.

I am an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carleton College. My research centers around designing algorithms for analysis of high-throughput DNA sequencing data. In particular, my work focuses around applications in cancer genomics. Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher and graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Brown University where I worked with Ben Raphael. I recieved a PhD and ScM in Computer Science from Brown University and a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College.

I received a Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine from the University of Milan. After an initial focus on the genetics of human neuromuscular disorders, I developed an interest for comparative genomics and for the evolution of non-coding sequences. Since 2007 I have been coordinating a research team with a focus in computational biology. In recent years, my research has mainly centered on the application of evolutionary approaches to study host-pathogen interactions in mammals and to investigate the evolutionary history of human pathogens.