Eugene Myers


Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.

Education

Myers received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Colorado.

Research

His 1990 paper describing BLAST has received over 62,000+ citations making it amongst the most highly cited papers ever. Along with Udi Manber, Myers invented the suffix array data structure.
Myers was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona, the Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics, and a member of the faculty at UC Berkeley. At Celera Genomics, Myers was involved in the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of Drosophila and mouse. In particular, Myers advocated the use of the whole genome shotgun sequencing technique.
Later, he became group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2012, Myers moved to Dresden to become one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He leads a center for systems biology.
His current research interests include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data, and genome assembly.
Myers was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004, together with Martin Vingron, Myers was awarded the Max Planck Research Prize for international cooperation in bioinformatics. He was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for outstanding contribution to bioinformatics, in particular his work on sequence comparison algorithms.

Awards and honours