David Sankoff (born December 31, 1942) is a Canadian mathematician,

bioinformatician Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combine ...

, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal ''Language Variation and Change'' (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and

computational genomics Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data (i.e., experimental data obtai ...

. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing

dynamic programming Dynamic programming is both a mathematical optimization method and a computer programming method. The method was developed by Richard Bellman in the 1950s and has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace engineering to economics. ...

for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words, " Michael_Waterman_.html" ;"title="Michael_Waterman.html" ;"title="Michael Waterman">Michael Waterman ">Michael_Waterman.html" ;"title="Michael Waterman">Michael Waterman and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."

Education

Sankoff published his first paper in 1963 while he was an undergraduate student in Mathematics at McGill University. Starting with his doctoral research, he developed mathematical formulations to a number of pivotal concepts in socio- and historical linguistics, including glottochronology,

variable rules analysis Variable rules analysis is a set of statistical analysis methods in linguistics that are commonly used in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to describe patterns of variation between alternative forms in language use. It is also sometimes ...

(with Henrietta Cedergren), the linguistic marketplace: and

code switching In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism ...

Career and research

After completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics, Sankoff began his academic career at the

University of Montreal A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

in 1969. In 1971, Sankoff became interested in molecular sequence comparison and devised the first quadratic-time variant of the

Needleman–Wunsch algorithm The Needleman–Wunsch algorithm is an algorithm used in bioinformatics to align protein or nucleotide sequences. It was one of the first applications of dynamic programming to compare biological sequences. The algorithm was developed by Saul ...

for pairwise sequence alignment. In 1973, Sankoff and Robert Cedergren developed a joint estimation method for

phylogeny A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spe ...

and

multiple sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) may refer to the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. In many cases, the input set of query sequences are assumed to have an evolutio ...

5S ribosomal RNA The 5S ribosomal RNA (5S rRNA) is an approximately 120 nucleotide-long ribosomal RNA molecule with a mass of 40 kDa. It is a structural and functional component of the large subunit of the ribosome in all domains of life (bacteria, archaea, and ...

, laying the algorithmic foundations of comparative genomics. In 1975, Sankoff and

Václav Chvátal Václav (Vašek) Chvátal () is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published e ...

studied the behavior of the

longest common subsequence problem The longest common subsequence (LCS) problem is the problem of finding the longest subsequence common to all sequences in a set of sequences (often just two sequences). It differs from the longest common substring problem: unlike substrings, sub ...

on random inputs; the constants of proportionality arising in this study have come to be known as the Chvátal–Sankoff constants. In 1980, Robert Cedergen and David Sankoff created the first research group in bioinformatics at the

. Sankoff's work in bioinformatics addresses RNA secondary structure, genome rearrangements, sequence alignment, genome evolution and

phylogenetics In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups ...

Awards and honors

* Inaugural recipient of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

's Senior Scientist Award in 2003. * Elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have "made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public lif ...

(1995) * Elected an

ISCB Fellow ISCB Fellowship is an award granted to scientists that the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) judges to have made “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. , there are 76 Fellow ...

by the

in 2009 * Marcel-Vincent Prize (1977) * Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award (2002) *

Weldon Memorial Prize The Weldon Memorial Prize, also known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is given yearly by the University of Oxford. The prize is to be awarded without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgeme ...

(2004) *

Excellence in Research Award (2013) * Honorary doctorate,

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

(2014)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sankoff, David 1942 births Living people Anglophone Quebec people Canada Research Chairs Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Academics from Montreal