Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. Previously he was based at the

Janelia Research Campus Janelia Research Campus is a scientific research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that opened in October 2006. The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of Ashburn. It is known for its scientific research and m ...

from 2006 to 2015 in

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. projects include the use of

Hidden Markov model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an o ...

s in

HMMER HMMER is a free and commonly used software package for sequence analysis written by Sean Eddy. Its general usage is to identify homologous protein or nucleotide sequences, and to perform sequence alignments. It detects homology by comparing ...

, Infernal Pfam and

Rfam Rfam is a database containing information about non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families and other structured RNA elements. It is an annotated, open access database originally developed at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in collaboration with Jane ...

Education

Eddy graduated June, 1982 from Marion Center Area High School, Marion Center, Pennsylvania. He then completed a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in Biology at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1986, followed by a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

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 ...

at the

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University o ...

under the supervision of Larry Gold in 1991 studying the T4 phage.

Career

From 1992 to 1995 he was a

postdoctoral A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a pr ...

at the Medical Research Council (MRC)

Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...

(LMB) in Cambridge UK working with

John Sulston Sir John Edward Sulston (27 March 1942 – 6 March 2018) was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' in 2002 with ...

and Richard Durbin. From 1995 to 2007 he worked at

Washington University School of Medicine Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) is the medical school of Washington University in St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1891, the School of Medicine has 1,260 students, 604 of which are pursuing a medical degree with ...

and has been working for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2000.

Awards and honours

In 2007, Sean was the winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics for contributions to Open Access in the Life Sciences. In 2022, Eddy was elected as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

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 ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eddy, Sean Living people American bioinformaticians Human Genome Project scientists Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Washington University in St. Louis mathematicians 21st-century American biologists Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard University faculty Washington University School of Medicine faculty California Institute of Technology alumni