 Sorin Istrail, Ph.D. Sorin Istrail has a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Bucharest, Romania. After his immigration to the US, he was a visiting scientist at MIT and also taught at Wesleyan University. He joined Sandia National Labs in 1992 where he held several positions, including Principal Senior Member of the Technical Staff. From 1992 to 2000, he led the Sandia National Labs research in genomics and structural proteomics within the Computational Biology Project, part of the DOE Applied Mathematics Program—a program started at DOE by John von Neumann. In April 2000, he joined Celera Genomics. Currently he is Senior Director and Head of the Informatics Research Division at Celera/Applied Biosystems. Istrail's work has been focused on combinatorial algorithms, computational complexity, programming languages, and on applications of computer science to biology, physics and chemistry. In 2000, he resolved a longstanding open problem in statistical mechanics, the Three-Dimensional Ising Model Problem; the negative solution shows the "impossibility" (computational intractability) of deriving closed forms explicit partition functions for every three-dimensional model. Recent work of Istrail's research group at Celera has been devoted to algorithmic design and software development for the following areas: genetics of SNPs and haplotypes, high-throughput EST mapping, genomic vaccine design and comparative peptidomics, compu/combichem and protein structure, BLAST-replacement tools, genomic regulatory systems, literature data mining, DNA array design and expression analysis, and game theory and pharma economic behavior. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology, Co-Founder of the RECOMB Conference Series, Co-Editor of the MIT Press Computational Molecular Biology Book Series, and Co-Editor of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics Book Series. Celera Genomics 45 West Gude Drive Rockville, MD 20850 (240) 453-3668 (240) 453-3324 FAX sorin.istrail@celera.com MORE INFORMATION For information about past research projects, publications, etc. click here. |
 
RETURN TO INVITED SPEAKERS |