The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) has awarded its Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award to David Haussler, professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
Haussler will receive the award and deliver a keynote presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Toronto in July. The ISMB is the largest conference on computational biology worldwide.
A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Haussler is director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UCSC and scientific codirector of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). His research lies at the interface of mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology. He develops new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular evolution of the human genome, using cross-species comparative genomics to study gene structure, function, and regulation. In recent years, he has begun taking his computational hypotheses to the laboratory for further study in living systems.
Haussler joined the UCSC faculty in 1986. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He has won a number of awards, including the 2006 Dickson Prize for Science from Carnegie Mellon University and the 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award.
