William Pearson (scientist) explained

William R Pearson
Birth Name:William Raymond Pearson
Fields:Computational biology
Workplaces:University of Virginia
Thesis Title:Studies on the arrangement of repeated sequences in DNA
Thesis Url:https://search.proquest.com/docview/302832904
Thesis Year:1977
Doctoral Advisors:)-->
Known For:FASTA[1] [2] [3]
Awards:AAAS Fellow (2008)
ISCB Fellow (2018)
Spouses:)-->

William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine[4] at the University of Virginia.[5] [6] Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format.

Education

Pearson graduated with a BS in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1977 from Caltech. As a graduate student, he published several papers describing computer programs for analyzing biological data.[7] [8]

Career and research

After his PhD, Pearson did a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. In 1983, he joined the faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.[5] Immediately after joining the faculty, he collaborated with David J. Lipman at the NIH to write the FASTP program, and later FASTA. Pearson's research interests are in computational biology. He was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2008, and an International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Fellow in 2018 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.[9] [10]

Notes and References

  1. Book: Pearson. William R.. [5] Rapid and sensitive sequence comparison with FASTP and FASTA. 183. 1990. 63–98. 0076-6879. 10.1016/0076-6879(90)83007-V. Methods in Enzymology. 2156132. 9780121820848.
  2. Lipman. D.. Pearson. W.. Rapid and sensitive protein similarity searches. Science. 227. 4693. 1985. 1435–1441. 0036-8075. 10.1126/science.2983426. 2983426. 1985Sci...227.1435L.
  3. Pearson . W. R.. Lipman . D. J.. David J. Lipman. Improved tools for biological sequence comparison. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 85. 8. 2444–2448. 1988. 3162770. 280013 . 10.1073/pnas.85.8.2444. 1988PNAS...85.2444P. free.
  4. Web site: Biochemistry Research - Pearson. fasta.bioch.virginia.edu/wrpearson.
  5. Web site: Pearson, William R.. med.virginia.edu.
  6. Web site: Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program - William R. Pearson. bims.virginia.edu.
  7. WT. Garrard. WR. Pearson. SK. Wake. J. Bonner. Stoichiometry of chromatin proteins. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. 58. 1974. 50–57. 10.1016/0006-291x(74)90889-4. 4831079.
  8. WR. Pearson. EH. Davidson. RJ. Britten. A program for least squares analysis of reassociation and hybridization data. Nucleic Acids Research. 4. 1977. 6 . 1727–1737. 10.1093/nar/4.6.1727. 896473. 342517.
  9. Web site: AAAS fellows. www.aaas.org. Anon. 2008.
  10. Web site: ISCB Fellows. iscb.org. International Society for Computational Biology. Anon. 2018.