1. GENE MYERS Sequence Comparison Wizard

2. Basics Full name: Eugene ‘Gene’ Wimberly Myers, Jr. Nationality: American B.S. in Mathematics, Cal Tech Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Colorado, 1981

3. Career Faculty member, University of Arizona Vice President of Informatics Research, Celera Genomics Faculty member, UC-Berkely Group leader, Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

4. Contributions to Bioinformatics Lead developer of BLAST Major proponent for the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique Inventor of the suffix array data structure

5. Major Achievements Sequencing the human, mouse and Drosophila melanogaster genomes Voted most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003 Winner of the 2004 Max-Plank Research Prize

6. Current Research Myers is departing from sequence analysis to computationally map neuroanatomical data ◦ Is working to reconstruct neural pathways of mouse and fly brains to understand their functions Developing algorithms and software to automatically interpret images produced by electron microscopy and create 3D and 4D “atlases” of brains, organisms, and cellular processes