David Haussler

David Haussler, born in 1953, is an American bioinformatician known for leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project, and afterwards for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding of the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for developments in computational learning theory and bioinformatics, including that first assembly, its analysis and data sharing. He is a distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering and founding scientific director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences on that campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford and at UC San Francisco.