Stephen Altschul
| Stephen Altschul | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephen Frank Altschul February 28, 1957 |
| Citizenship | United states |
| Fields | Bioinformatics |
| Institutions | NCBI |
| Alma mater |
Harvard University (A.B., Mathematics) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., Mathematics) |
| Thesis | Aspects of Biological Sequence Comparison (1987) |
| Doctoral advisor | Daniel Kleitman |
| Known for | BLAST |
| Spouse | Caroline Kershaw James (m. 1994) |
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Website www |
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Stephen Frank Altschul (born February 28, 1957) is an American mathematician who has designed algorithms that are used in the field of bioinformatics (the Karlin-Altschul algorithm and its successors). Altschul is the co-author of the BLAST algorithm used for sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides.
Altschul graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics and has a Ph.D. in the same field from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His research interest is centered on sequence alignment algorithms, statistics of sequence comparison and measurement of sequence similarity.
He is the son of Stephanie Rosemary (née Wagner) and Arthur Altschul, a former partner at Goldman Sachs. In 1994, he married Caroline Kershaw James, the daughter of Caroline James-Pritz of Cincinnati and Harry Keithan James of Dayton, Ohio. The Rev. Luther D. Miller Jr. performed the ceremony at St. David's Episcopal Church in Washington.
His half-sister is journalist Serena Altschul known for her tenure at MTV. On his father's side, he is a member of the Lehman family.
During his undergraduate years, Dr. Altschul developed an interest in biology. As a result, he started reading books about DNA. One of the books which he read was "The Double Helix" by Watson. Furthermore, he had also taken a course on Evolutionary Biology. Dr. Altschul had also spent two summers working in laboratories at Rockfeller University where he helped to write computer codes for an X-ray crystallography project.
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