Recorded: 08 May 2012
David Haussler, I’m at the University of California Santa Cruz – Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering.
I came out of the background of mathematics and algorithms for computer analysis and large datasets. I got very excited about DNA datasets and protein datasets, in the late 80s and early 90s we developed a methodology of hidden Markov models to study sequences that were obtained from early bits of E. coli. Only a tiny fraction of E. coli was sequenced in the early days. There were various viruses like T7 and Fye-X[?] that we analyzed, looking for patterns in the DNA with statistical algorithms that could recognize binding sites and so forth.
David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and UC San Francisco Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department.