Webb Colby Miller (born 1943) is a professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at

The Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

Education

Miller attended

Whitman College Whitman College is a private liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington. The school offers 53 majors and 33 minors in the liberal arts and sciences, and it has a student-to-faculty ratio of 9:1. Whitman was the first college in the Pacifi ...

, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

in 1969.

Research and career

He joined

Penn State #Redirect Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campu ...

in September 1985. Prior to that, he had held a position as permanent staff member at the IBM

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and with ...

and served on the faculty at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

, and the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

. He is a fellow of the ISCB (

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 ...

). Miller has been developing algorithms and software for analyzing DNA sequences and related types of data from molecular genetics. He is one of the authors of

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: * Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film) ...

. He also develops methods for aligning long DNA sequences and extracting functional information from them. Webb Miller has made important contributions to the analysis of many vertebrate genomes. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

. Webb Miller's recent research interests include the bioinformatics of species extinction, collaborating with Stephan Schuster, who is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State. In November 2008, they published a paper in

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

that described a draft sequence for the

woolly mammoth The woolly mammoth (''Mammuthus primigenius'') is an extinct species of mammoth that lived during the Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with '' Mammuthus subp ...

genome.

Awards

Miller was awarded the

ISCB Senior Scientist Award The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award is an annual prize awarded by the International Society for Computational Biology for contributions to the field of computational biology. Laureates *2021 - Peer Bork *2020 - Steven Salzberg *20 ...

and 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. He is also among The 2009

Time 100 ''Time'' 100 (often stylized as ''TIME'' 100) is an annual listicle of the 100 most influential people in the world, assembled by the American news magazine ''Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, po ...

. Together with

Gene Myers Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers receiv ...

, he received the Inaugural IEEE

Frances E. Allen Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932August 4, 2020) was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing ...

Medal "for pioneering contributions to sequence analysis algorithms and their applications to biosequence search, genome sequencing, and comparative genome analyses".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Webb American bioinformaticians Pennsylvania State University faculty Living people University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty University of Arizona faculty Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology 1943 births