IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022 - 14

2022 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal
Sponsored by IBM
Eugene Wimberly Myers Jr.
and Webb Miller
For pioneering contributions to sequence analysis algorithms
and their applications to biosequence search, genome sequencing,
and comparative genome analyses
The computational innovations of Eugene Wimberly Myers
Jr. and Webb Miller have been central to progress on the most
important tasks in DNA and protein sequence data analysis,
directly enabling the genomic revolution in biological science
and medicine. Recognizing the future importance of what is
now called bioinformatics, Myers and Miller are prominent
pioneers of the development of algorithms and software tools
for genomic search, comparison, and assembly. During the mid
to late 1980s, they worked as a team to develop many seminal
methods, including alignment in linear space, the O(nd) greedy
algorithm for the unit cost model, alignment with concave gap
costs, approximate match to a regular expression or context-free
language, alignment of restriction maps, bit-vector matching
methods, and suffix arrays. This body of joint work culminated
in the famous BLAST search engine, where they developed the
" seed-and-extend " paradigm using the idea of sequence neighborhoods
to achieve a search speed for approximate match that
still stands today and serves as the core of the NIH sequence
database search engine that provides hundreds of thousands of
searches a day. Independently, both Myers and Miller have continued
to shape the field of molecular biology. Myers has made
critical contributions to the genome assembly problem of how
to reconstruct entire genome sequences billions of bases long
from short pieces on the order of 1,000 bases. He made the
case for applying whole genome shotgun assembly to large genomes
such as the human genome and then did so at Celera
Genomics in 2001. Myers is currently a coleader of the Vertebrate
Genomes Project, which aims to provide high-quality reference
genome sequences for all vertebrates. Miller has worked
on the important problem of how to calculate and represent
the sequence alignments representing evolutionary relationships
between whole genome sequences. He introduced a number
of theoretical and practical innovations and implementations
and established principles still underlying current solutions to
whole genome alignment. He also co-led the analysis of the
first genome-scale reconstruction of the sequence of an extinct
species-the woolly mammoth.
An IEEE Senior Member and member of the U.S. National
Academy of Engineering, Myers is a director of the Max Planck
Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and founding
director of the associated Center for Systems Biology, Dresden,
Germany.
Recipient of the 2009 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award
from the International Society of Computational Biology, Miller
is a professor (retired) with the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania
State University, State College, PA, USA.
Scope: For innovative work in computing leading to lasting impact on other aspects of engineering, science, technology, or society.
14 | 2022 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022