Speakers

Sorin Istrail is the James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science, and former Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University. He is Professor Honoris Causa of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania.
Before joining Brown, he was the Senior Director and Head of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics, where his group played a central role in the construction of the sequence of the human genome; they co-authored "The Sequence of the Human Genome" (Science, 2001) which, with over 20,000 citations to date, is one of the most cited scientific paper. His group at Celera Genomics also built a powerful suite of genome-assembly-to-genome-assembly alignment algorithms that was used for the comparison of all human genome assemblies to date in the paper "Whole Genome Shotgun Assembly and Comparison of Human Genome Assemblies" (PNAS 2004). In 2002, his Celera group in collaboration with the company ClearForrest won the ACM KDD Cup - the top international data mining/machine learning competition. The challenge then was the automatic annotation of a section of the Drosophila genome.

In 2003, he joined the ranks of Applied Biosystems Science Fellows, one of just six science fellows in a company of 800 scientists. Before Celera, Professor Istrail founded and led the Computational Biology Project at Sandia National Laboratories (1992-2000). In 2000, he obtained the negative solution (computational intractability) of a 50 years old unresolved problem in statistical mechanics, the Three-Dimensional Ising Model Problem (STOC 2000). This work was included in the Top 100 Most Important Discoveries of the U.S. Department of Energy's first 25 years, and as the 7th top achievement of DOE in Advanced Scientific Computing.

Professor Istrail's current research focuses on SNPs and haplotypes and genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the regulatory genome and gene regulatory networks, and protein folding algorithms; algorithms and computational complexity; and statistical physics.
He is the former Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology (2000 - 2020) and together with Pavel Pevnzer and Mike Waterman, he is the co-founded the RECOMB Conference Series (Annual International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology) in 1997. He is the co-editor of the MIT Press Computational Molecular Biology series, and co-editor of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series.