David Haussler, a distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering and director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, is among the top scientists in computer science, ranked sixth in the 2021 Seventh Edition of the Top Scientists Ranking for Computer Science & Electronics.
Haussler’s early research in machine learning helped found the field of computational learning theory, and his later work helped revolutionize the field of genomics with the introduction of advanced statistical and algorithmic methods. His genomics work accelerates the understanding of cancer, human development, evolution, neuroscience and many other areas of the life sciences.
Prepared by Guide2Research, one of the leading portals for computer science research, the Top Scientists Ranking is a definitive list of leading scientists from the field of computer science and electronics, based on a detailed examination of more than 6,300 profiles on Google Scholar and DBLP (an online computer science bibliography service). Position in the ranking is based on each scientist’s influential contributions as measured by their “h-index.” The h-index quantifies an individual's scientific research output, measuring both productivity and citation impact (how often a scientist’s publications are cited by other researchers).
Haussler’s work lies at the interface of mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology. He develops new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular function and evolution of the human genome, integrating cross-species comparative and high-throughput genomics data to study gene structure, function, and regulation. He is credited with early insights into the power of artificial neural networks and other machine learning methods, and for pioneering the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) in genomics.
As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, his team posted the first publicly available computational assembly of the human genome sequence on the Internet on July 7, 2000. Following this, his team developed the UCSC Genome Browser, a web-based tool that is used extensively in biomedical research and serves as the platform for several large-scale genomics projects.
A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Haussler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received many awards and honors for his accomplishments, including the 2015 Dan David Prize, the 2011 Weldon Memorial Prize from University of Oxford, and the 2003 ACM Allen Newell Award. Haussler received his PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He joined the UCSC faculty in 1986.
