Owen White is a bioinformatician and director of the Institute For Genome Sciences at the

University of Maryland School of Medicine The University of Maryland School of Medicine (abbreviated UMSOM), located in Baltimore City, Maryland, U.S., is the medical school of the University of Maryland, Baltimore and is affiliated with the University of Maryland Medical Center and Me ...

. He is known for his work on the bioinformatics tools

GLIMMER In bioinformatics, GLIMMER (Gene Locator and Interpolated Markov ModelER) is used to find genes in prokaryotic DNA. "It is effective at finding genes in bacteria, archea, viruses, typically finding 98-99% of all relatively long protein coding g ...

and MUMmer.

Education

White studied

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

, gaining a bachelor of science degree in 1985. He later studied with Christopher A. Fields at New Mexico State University, gaining his PhD in

molecular biology Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physi ...

in 1992.

Research

From 1992 to 1994, White was a postdoctoral fellow in the Genome Informatics department at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in

Rockville, Maryland Rockville is a city that serves as the county seat of Montgomery County, Maryland, and is part of the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area. The 2020 census tabulated Rockville's population at 67,117, making it the fifth-largest community in ...

. This was followed by a period as a collaborative investigator in the Department of Bioinformatics at TIGR. While at TIGR, White was one of the developers of the

(Gene Locator and Interpolated Markov ModelER) gene discovery algorithm, alongside

Steven Salzberg Steven Lloyd Salzberg (born 1960) is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is als ...

and colleagues. Salzberg and White were also involved in the development of the MUMmer software for

sequence alignment In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Alig ...

. White became director of bioinformatics at TIGR in 2000. He has also been involved in the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

Human Microbiome Project, where he was

principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...

of the Data Analysis and Coordination Center for the first phase of the project.

Awards and honors

In 2015, White was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics for his promotion of free and open-access materials and methods in the life sciences.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:White, Owen Living people American bioinformaticians Year of birth missing (living people)