September 25, 2001
Contact: Tim Stephens (831) 459-2495; stephens@cats.ucsc.edu

UC Santa Cruz Professor David Haussler Named 2001 Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine

SANTA CRUZ, CA--R&D magazine has selected David Haussler, UC Presidential Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as the magazine's 2001 Scientist of the Year. The editors and editorial advisory board of R&D magazine chose Haussler for this honor based on his accomplishments and recognition in the field of bioinformatics and computer science.

Haussler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and director of UCSC's Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE), is perhaps best known for his ongoing work on the assembly and analysis of the human genome. The CBSE is one of 19 centers around the world that make up the International Human Genome Mapping Consortium, a crucial component of the Human Genome Project.

Past recipients of R&D's Scientist of the Year award include Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems; J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics; Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium; and Leroy Hood, director of the Institute for Systems Biology and inventor of the automated DNA sequencer.

The award includes a trophy and a $5,000 educational grant made in Haussler's name to the college or university of his choice by the corporate sponsor, National Instruments of Austin, Texas. Haussler will receive the award at the 39th annual R&D 100 Awards banquet on October 4 at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. These awards have been referred to by the Chicago Tribune as the Nobel Prizes of applied research. Haussler and his accomplishments will also be featured in the cover story in the November issue of R&D magazine.

Haussler's involvement in the Human Genome Project is due to his leadership in the field of bioinformatics, which applies the theories and tools of mathematics and computer science to the vast databases of biological information generated by modern research techniques. A relatively new discipline, bioinformatics is playing an increasingly important role in the Human Genome Project, which aims to determine the complete DNA sequence of the human genome and identify all of the genes it contains. Haussler and his coworkers at UCSC have developed some of the most effective computational techniques for finding genes in DNA sequences.

R&D magazine is distributed to more than 100,000 scientists and engineers working in industrial, academic, and government research labs, primarily in the United States.

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