David Haussler
Computer Science
Research & Invention

David Haussler is a distinguished contributor to the field of computational biology whose accomplishments in genome analysis are internationally recognized. He introduced many methods from the field of machine learning into computational molecular biology and in so doing, has developed further improvements to those methods.

After earning his PhD in computer science under CU Professor Andrzej Ehrenfeucht in 1982, Haussler went onto play a significant role in the decoding of the human genome.

As a member of the computer science faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he introduced hidden Markov models (HMMs) for protein sequence analysis, developed a kernel function from the profiles to be used in support vector machine training, and produced the first public, large-scale rough draft assemblies of the entire human genome sequence.

Haussler’s work became a key component of the international collaboration to complete the reference sequence, and his research group has made continuing contributions to the discovery of information in the sequence, such as finding the genes and characterizing the evolutionary properties uncovered by comparing the mouse and human sequences.

He currently is a professor in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at UC-Santa Cruz as well as an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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