William Pearson (scientist)


William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format.

Education

Pearson graduated with a BS in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1977 from CalTech.

Career and research

After his PhD, Pearson did a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Pearson's research interests are in computational biology. He was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2018 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.