American College of Medical Informatics Fellows and International Associates, 2001

Abstract

Stephen Altschul is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is part of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. He received his AB summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard College and a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Altschul held an IRTA postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematics Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases before moving to the NCBI, where he has been for the past 12 years. His research has focused on developing measures, algorithms, and statistics for the comparison and analysis of DNA and protein sequences. He played a central role in developing the blast and psi-blast sequence database search programs, and his articles describing these programs have become, respectively, the most cited scientific papers published since 1990 and 1995. Dr. Altschul has served on grants committees for the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH and for the Medical Research Council of Canada. He has been a member of the editorial boards of Protein Sequences & Data Analysis, Gene-combis , and Genome Biology and is invited to be a keynote speaker at the Tenth Annual Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology. Dennis Benson is Chief of the Information Resources Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology, National Library of Medicine. Dr. Benson received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the neuroscience program at the University of Florida. Prior to his current position, Dr. Benson was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where his research focused on the neurophysiology of the auditory cortex. He came to the Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications at the NLM in 1980 and worked on knowledge-based retrieval systems in the area …