Professor and Head, Computational Biology Department Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Biography

Russell Schwartz received his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the last in 2000, followed by postdoctoral work in the MIT Biology Department. He then worked as an Informatics Research Scientist at Celera Genomics Corporation, where he was involved in some of the first efforts to sequence the human genome and characterize genome-wide variation in the human species. Since 2002, he has been a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University where he is currently Professor and Head of the Computational Biology Department in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences with additional appointments in the CMU Computer Science Department and Machine Learning Department. His laboratory has worked broadly on algorithms, machine learning, and simulation methods for computational genetics, genomics, and biophysics, with a current focus largely on computational cancer biology and somatic variation. Schwartz has long been active in bioinformatics education as an instructor and program director as well as a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Education Committee. He was one of the founders of the ISCB Curriculum Task Force and currently serves as co-chair of the ISCB Community of Special Interest (COSI) in Education, a member of the ISCB Board of Directors, and was recently elected a Vice President of the ISCB.