Computational biology

John Kececioglu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the BIO5 Institute. His research is in applied algorithms, especially for areas of bioinformatics and computational biology such as: multiple alignment, inverse alignment, sequence assembly, and genome rearrangement. Software developed by his group includes Opal, a tool for multiple sequence alignment; Facet, a tool for alignment accuracy estimation; Ipa, a tool for inverse sequence alignment; AlignAlign, a tool for optimally aligning alignments, and Ninja, a tool for evolutionary tree construction. John is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and is on the Editorial Board of Algorithms for Molecular Biology. He was Conference Chair for RECOMB 2009, and Program Committee Co-Chair in the area of Sequence Analysis for ISMB 2011 and BCB 2012. John served as Associate Head of the Department of Computer Science during 2012.

Dr. Bonnie Hurwitz is an Assistant Professor of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona and BIO5 Research Institute Fellow. She has worked as a computational biologist for nearly two decades on interdisciplinary projects in both industry and academia. Her research on the human/earth microbiome incorporates large-scale –omics datasets, high-throughput computing, and big data analytics towards research questions in “One Health”. In particular, Dr. Hurwitz is interested in the relationship between the environment, microbial communities, and their hosts. Dr. Hurwitz is well-cited for her work in computational biology in diverse areas from plant genomics to viral metagenomics with over 1200 citations