Dr. David Sankoff

Based in Ontario, Canada

Bio:

After three decades at Mathematics Research Center of the University of Montreal, most of them as a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, David Sankoff moved to the University of Ottawa as the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the International Society for Computational Biology, and the ACM. He is a recipient of the Weldon Medal from Oxford University and a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

His main research contributions have been the formulation of new computational problems and the design of algorithms for addressing them prior to their emergence as major subjects in bioinformatics. These include the quadratic algorithm for alignment, tree-based multiple alignment, multiple loops in RNA secondary structure and, most influential, simultaneous folding and alignment. He also initiated the study of the limit behavior of random sequences.

He is responsible for a number of key advances in phylogenetics, including a general approach for optimizing the nodes of a given tree, the computational complexity of several phylogeny problems, and a general technique for phylogenetic invariants.

In sociolinguistics, Sankoff introduced statistical and computational methodology, including software still in widespread use, for studying grammatical variation and change in speech communities. He founded the main journal in quantitative sociolinguistics and edited it for 20 years.

The focus of his current research is the modelling of processes of genomic rearrangements, devising algorithms and statistical analyses capable of reconstructing evolutionary history and characterizing it. Here he introduced the computational analysis of genomic edit distances, phylogeny based on gene order, algorithms for analyzing genome duplication and tests for gene clusters at the genomic level.

Sankoff has been an enthusiastic participant in the ACM environment for many years. He has spoken at numerous ACM sponsored meetings, published in the association's journals and endorsed the nominations of many of the current fellows.

Available Lectures

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Maximal matching, gap statistics, complete link and the reconstruction of ancient flowering plant genomes.
Starting with the phylogeny, or family tree, of a plant order, and the linear ordering of the 20,000 - 50,000 genes on the chromosomes of some typical species in this order, we wish...

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