Steven Salzberg

Steven Salzberg is an American Biologist and Computer Scientist who since 2005 has been the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science. He was previously the head of the Bioinformatics department at The Institute for Genomic Research, one of the world's largest genome sequencing centers, and prior to that he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Yale University in 1980 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1989.

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Dr. Salzberg together with David Lipman started the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, a project to sequence and make available the genomes of thousands of influenza virus isolates. He has been a leader in the field of gene finding and created the Glimmer program for bacterial gene finding as well as several programs for finding genes in animals, plants, and other organisms. He has also been a leader in genome assembly research and is one of the initiators of the open source AMOS project. He was a participant in the human genome project as well as many other genome projects, including the malaria genome (Plasmodium falciparum) and the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2001-2002, he and his colleagues sequenced the anthrax that was used in the 2001 anthrax attacks, which have been extensively investigated but not yet solved. They published their results in the journal Science in 2002.

He has also been a vocal advocate in favor of the teaching of evolution in schools in the U.S. and has authored editorials and appeared in print media on this topic.

Sources and further reading

• umd.edu biosketch
• jhu.edu Computational Methods for Genome Sequence Analysis - Steven Salzberg - 7/26/2000 - includes biography
• cs.duke.edu Duke Computer Science Colloquia Steven Salzberg - includes biography
• umd.edu Steven Salzberg's home page
• Article describing the anthrax genome from the 2001 attacks
• Article describing the first findings of the influenza genome project
• Editorial on evolution and the flu