Sorin Istrail
Senior Director
Informatics Research
Celera Genomics

Sorin Istrail is a computer scientist who has been working in a variety of areas of computer science, biology, physics and chemistry. For several well-studied basic computer science problems, and is the author or co-author of the fastest algorithms to date for these problems. He has work in the areas of computational linguistics, automata theory, parallel algorithms and architectures, semantics of parallel programming languages, programming logic, complexity theory and derandomization, combinatorics, graph theory, voting theory, game theory, genomic mapping, protein folding, biomolecular sequence alignment, biomaterials, combinatorial chemistry, structural proteomics, SNPs and haplotypes, and algorithms for vaccine design. Recently, he resolved a longstanding open problem in statistical mechanics, the Three-Dimensional Ising Model Problem, showing the impossibility of deriving explicit formulas for every three-dimensional model.

Sorin Istrail has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Bucharest, Romania. After his immigration to the US, he was a visiting scientist at MIT and also taught at Wesleyan University. He joined Sandia Labs in 1992 where he held several positions, including Principal Senior Member of the Technical Staff. From 1992 to 2000, he led the Sandia Labs research in genomics and structural proteomics within the DOE MICS Computational Biology Project. In April 2000, he joined Celera Genomics, where he is Senior Director of Informatics Research.

He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology, Co-Founder and General Vice-Chair of the RECOMB Conference Series, and Co-Editor of the MIT Press Computational Molecular Biology Book Series.