Webb Miller Explained

Webb Miller
Birth Name:Webb Colby Miller
Nationality:American
Field:Genomics
Bioinformatics
Evolution
Work Institutions:The Pennsylvania State University
Alma Mater:University of WashingtonWhitman College
Thesis Title:Toward Abstract Numerical Analysis
Thesis Year:1969
Thesis Url:http://search.proquest.com/docview/302439750/
Known For:BLAST
Prizes:ISCB Senior Scientist Award[1]
ISCB Fellow[2]
IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal

Webb Colby Miller (born 1943) is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University.[3]

Education

Miller attended Whitman College, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1969.

Research and career

He joined Penn State in September 1985. Prior to that, he had held a position as permanent staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and served on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Arizona. He is a fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology).

Miller has been developing algorithms and software for analyzing DNA sequences and related types of data from molecular genetics. He is one of the authors of BLAST.[4] [5] He also develops methods for aligning long DNA sequences and extracting functional information from them. Webb Miller has made important contributions to the analysis of many vertebrate genomes. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of computational biology.

Webb Miller's recent research interests include the bioinformatics of species extinction, collaborating with Stephan Schuster, who is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State. In November 2008, they published a paper in Nature that described a draft sequence for the woolly mammoth genome.[6]

Awards

Miller was awarded the ISCB Senior Scientist Award[1] and elected an ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology in 2009.[2] He is also among The 2009 Time 100. Together with Gene Myers, he received the Inaugural IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal[7] "for pioneering contributions to sequence analysis algorithms and their applications to biosequence search, genome sequencing, and comparative genome analyses".

Notes and References

  1. Morrison Mckay . B. J. . Sansom . C. . 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000375 . Webb Miller and Trey Ideker to Receive Top International Bioinformatics Awards for 2009 from the International Society for Computational Biology . PLOS Computational Biology . 5 . 4 . e1000375 . 2009 . 19390599. 2666155 . 2009PLSCB...5E0375M . free .
  2. Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20170320114530/https://www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows . 2017-03-20 . ISCB Fellows . iscb.org . . Anon . 2017 . dead .
  3. Web site: OCLC Classify -- an Experimental Classification Service.
  4. Altschul . S. . Stephen Altschul. Gish . W. . Warren Gish. Miller . W. . Webb Miller. Myers . E. . Eugene Myers. Lipman . D. . David J. Lipman. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool . 10.1016/S0022-2836(05)80360-2 . Journal of Molecular Biology . 215 . 3 . 403–410 . 1990 . 2231712 . 14441902 .
  5. Altschul . S. . Stephen Altschul. Madden . T. L. . Schäffer . A. A. . Zhang . J. . Zhang . Z. . Miller . W. . Webb Miller. Lipman . D. J. . David J. Lipman. Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: A new generation of protein database search programs . 10.1093/nar/25.17.3389 . Nucleic Acids Research . 25 . 17 . 3389–3402 . 1997 . 9254694. 146917 .
  6. Miller . W. . Webb Miller . Drautz . D. I. . Ratan . A. . Pusey . B. . Qi . J. . Lesk . A. M. . Tomsho . L. P. . Packard . M. D. . Zhao . F. . Sher . 10.1038/nature07446 . A. . Tikhonov . A. . Raney . B. . Patterson . N. . Lindblad-Toh . K. . Lander . E. S. . Knight . J. R. . Irzyk . G. P. . Fredrikson . K. M. . Harkins . T. T. . Sheridan . S. . Pringle . T. . Schuster . S. C. . Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth . Nature . 456 . 7220 . 387–390 . 2008 . 19020620 . 2008Natur.456..387M . 4425232 . free .
  7. Web site: Current IEEE Corporate Award Recipients. 2021-11-29. IEEE Awards. en-US.