Michael S. Waterman

University Professor at USC

Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Science

Michael Waterman holds an Endowed Associates Chair at USC. He came to USC in 1982 after positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University. He has a bachelors in Mathematics from Oregon State University, and a Ph.D. in Statistics and Probability is from Michigan State University. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995), was elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences (1995), and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2001). Also he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He has held visiting positions at the University of Hawaii (1979-80), the University of California at San Francisco (1982), Mt. Sinai Medical School (1988), Chalmers University (2000), and in 2000-2001 he held the Aisenstadt Chair at University of Montreal. In fall 2000 he became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. In 2002 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 2005 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences.

During 2003-2008, Professor Waterman held a 5-year term as Faculty Master of Parkside International Residence College. PIRC is a residential college that is home to over 600 undergraduates and serves as a center for internationally oriented cultural, academic and social events.

Beginning May 2008, in addition to his USC appointment, Michael Waterman became Chair Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He leads a team of distinguished scientists consisting of Michael Zhang (Cold Spring Harbor Labs), Wing Wong (Stanford), Jun Liu (Harvard), Tao Jiang (UC Riverside) and Fengzhu Sun (USC). The team will collectively work to enhance Tsinghua's programs in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Professor Waterman works in the area of Computational Biology, concentrating on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping. He is a founding editor of Journal of Computational Biology, is on the editorial board of seven journals, is the author of Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes and is a co-author of the text Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction.