Steven L. Salzberg
Senior Director of Bioinformatics
The Institute for Genomic Research

Dr. Steven L. Salzberg is the Senior Director of Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland. He is also Research Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and Research Professor of Biology at Johns Hopkins. TIGR is a nonprofit, basic research institute devoted to the sequencing and analysis of human, animal, plant, and microbial genomes to better understand the role that genes play in evolution, development, human disease, and all other aspects of life.

Dr. Salzberg received his B.A. degree in English and M.S. and M.Phil. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. Following his Ph.D. studies, he joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1989. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996, and has been a Research Professor since 1999. In 1997 he joined TIGR as an Investigator in the Bioinformatics Department, and he assumed the role of Director of Bioinformatics in 1998.

Through much of his early career, Dr. Salzberg's interests focused on machine learning and its applications to fields ranging from astronomy to molecular biology. His interest in the human genome project motivated him to develop one of the first computational gene-finding systems for the human genome in the mid-1990s. His initial collaborations with TIGR at that time led to the development of a microbial gene-finding system that was subsequently used to annotate the genomes of the Lyme disease bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, the syphilis bacterium Treponema pallidum, M. tuberculosis, V. cholerae, and over 30 more microbial genomes that have been completed since then. Dr. Salzberg and his research team developed a eukaryotic gene finder, first used for Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, and later adapted to many other eukaryotes, including plants and animals. His group has also developed systems for large-scale genome sequence alignment, operon discovery, and recognition of regulatory sequences. He has formed a Genome Archaeology group at TIGR that studies genome duplications, rearrangements, and other evolutionary phenomena in a wide range of organisms.

Dr. Salzberg has authored or co-authored two books and over 80 publications in leading scientific journals and conferences, and is currently on the Editorial Boards of three journals. His group has developed and released two major gene finding systems, Glimmer and GlimmerM, and a sequence alignment system, MUMmer, each of which has been distributed to many hundreds of scientific laboratories around the globe.

Personal information: Dr Salzberg is married to Claudia Salzberg (nee Pasche) with two children. His interests include tennis, golf, and the history of polar exploration.