Short Biography

Steven L. Salzberg
Updated 2011

Dr. Steven Salzberg is a Professor of Medicine, Biostatistics, and Computer Science in the McKusick- Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. From 2005-2011, he was the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously he was Senior Director of Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where he was involved in sequencing the genomes of the many bacteria, including those used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. He contributed to the Human Genome Project and co-founded the influenza virus sequencing project, the first large-scale survey of flu virus genomes. His research group has developed many pioneering algorithms for gene finding, sequence alignment, and genome assembly, and their open source software systems have been downloaded by thousands of scientific laboratories around the globe.

Dr. Salzberg received his B.A., M.S., and M.Phil. degrees from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. He joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1989.

Dr. Salzberg has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific journal publications and two books. He also writes a widely-read science column at Forbes magazine, http://blogs.forbes.com/stevensalzberg. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a past member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH.