Michael Spencer Waterman

Professor Michael S. Waterman is the Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science at the University of Southern California. 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 bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University, and a PhD in Statistics and Probability from Michigan State University. 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. Waterman received a Gairdner Foundation International Award (2002), the Friendship Award from the Chinese government (2013) and the Dan David Prize (2015). He is an elected Foreign Member of the French Académie des Sciences (2005) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013). He received Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa from Tel Aviv University (2011) and Southern Denmark University (2013). His research centers on computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. His work has advanced biological sequence analysis from a collection of ad hoc procedures to a more rigorous and mature subject. Alignment algorithms for computer-based comparison of DNA and protein sequences include the Smith-Waterman algorithm for finding relationships between new sequences and those already collected in databases. The Lander-Waterman analysis of physical mapping projects, and a new approach to sequence assembly also are used in genome projects.