Gary D. Stormo Symposium on Computational Biology - Dr. Gary D. Stormo

The Department of Genetics presents the Gary D. Stormo Symposium on Computational Biology! This event celebrates Dr. Gary D. Stormo and his achievements as a pioneer in computational biology, as well as his legacy as an inspiring mentor and educator. His colleagues, collaborators, and former trainees will speak on Dr. Stormo’s accomplishments in computational biology, current developments in the field, and on the history of the Computational Biology Ph.D. program at Washington University in St. Louis.

About Gary D. Stormo:
Dr. Stormo is the Joseph Erlanger Professor Emeritus in the Department of Genetics at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Caltech and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he worked in the lab of Larry Gold. During his Ph.D. work, Dr. Stormo pioneered new computational methods for modeling and discovering binding motifs in DNA sequences. These include an early artificial intelligence perceptron method and position weight matrices, which became the most widely used models of sequence specificity in the field. After his graduate work, Dr. Stormo joined the faculty at UC Boulder, where he remained until 1999, when he moved to the Department of Genetics at Washington University. There he played a pivotal role in the creation of the Computational and Systems Biology graduate program, for which he was the founding director. Dr. Stormo’s lab developed many influential algorithms and technologies for the study of protein-nucleic acid binding and the
regulation of transcription and translation, including important methods
that take advantage of large datasets produced by high-throughput
sequencing. Dr. Stormo was Editor-in-Chief of Bioinformatics and is a fellow
of the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Society for
Computational Biology. He is the recipient of the Carl and Gerty Cori
Faculty Achievement Award. Dr. Stormo’s broad influence on the field of
computational biology comes not only from his own work, but also through his generous mentorship of more 30 graduate students, nearly 30 postdocs, and many junior faculty and collaborators at UC Boulder, Washington
University, and institutions around the world.