David Haussler

David Haussler is a Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and of the Training Program in Stem Cell Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also scientific co-director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3); and a consulting professor at both Stanford Medical School and UC San Francisco Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department. Haussler is a bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding of the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a leader in the fields of computational learning theory and bioinformatics and introduced the use of powerful statistical models (hidden Markov models and related methods) to the analysis of biological sequences of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Haussler's research lies at the interface of mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology. He develops new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular function and evolution of the human genome, integrating cross-species comparative and high-throughput genomics data to study gene structure, function, and regulation. He is credited with pioneering the use of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Stochastic Context-Free Grammars, and discriminative kernel method for analyzing DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. He was the first to apply the latter methods to the genome-wide search for gene expression biomarkers in cancer, now a major effort of his laboratory. He studies the vast DNA regions that do not code for proteins, often called "junk" DNA. His research strongly suggests that this "junk" has biological relevance, including the regulation of genes that build proteins. He has won a number of awards, including the 2011 Weldon Memorial Prize from University of Oxford, the 2009 ASHG Curt Stern Award in Human Genetics, the 2008 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award from the International Society for Computational Biology, the 2005 Dickson Prize for Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and the 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in Artificial Intelligence.