Dr. Ron Shamir is a professor at the school of computer science and Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University. He has a BSc in mathematics and physics from the Hebrew University and a PhD degree in operations research from UC Berkeley. Since 1990, he is specializing in design and analysis of algorithms for problems in molecular biology. He was the founding director of the Bioinformatics program at Tel Aviv University. His current research focuses on developing computational tools for gene expression analysis, DNA chips, comparative genomics, genetic networks and haplotyping. He is a member of the editorial board of several leading journals and series in computational biology, and on the steering committee of RECOMB. Dr. Shamir has published over 120 scientific publications.

The software tools developed by Shamir’s group include the Expander suite for gene expression analysis, biclustering, promoter analysis and visualization, the Hyden software for designing highly degenerate primers, SpecAlign, a method for resequencing by hybridization, and Gerbil, a likelihood based tool for phasing an block partitioning of genotypes.