Webb Miller

{{Short description|American bioinformatician}}

{{For|another person|Webb Miller (journalist)}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Webb Miller

| birth_name = Webb Colby Miller

| image = Webb_miller.jpg

| image_size = 120px

| caption =

| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1943}}

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| residence =

| citizenship =

| nationality = American

| ethnicity =

| field = Genomics
Bioinformatics
Evolution{{Google scholar id}}

| work_institutions = The Pennsylvania State University

| alma_mater = University of Washington

Whitman College

| doctoral_advisor =

| thesis_title = Toward Abstract Numerical Analysis

| thesis_year = 1969

| thesis_url = https://www.proquest.com/docview/302439750/

| doctoral_students =

| known_for = BLAST

| influences =

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| prizes = ISCB Senior Scientist Award{{Cite journal | last1 = Morrison Mckay | first1 = B. J. | last2 = Sansom | first2 = C. | doi = 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000375 | title = Webb Miller and Trey Ideker to Receive Top International Bioinformatics Awards for 2009 from the International Society for Computational Biology | journal = PLOS Computational Biology | volume = 5 | issue = 4 | pages = e1000375 | year = 2009 | pmid = 19390599| pmc =2666155 | bibcode = 2009PLSCB...5E0375M | doi-access = free }}
ISCB Fellow{{cite web|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20170320114530/https://www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows |archivedate=2017-03-20 |url=https://www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows |website=iscb.org |title=ISCB Fellows |publisher=International Society for Computational Biology |author=Anon |year=2017 |url-status=dead }}

IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal

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| website = {{URL|http://www.bx.psu.edu/miller_lab}}

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Webb Colby Miller (born 1943) is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University.{{Cite web|url=http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?search-author-txt=%22Miller%2C+Webb+Colby%2C+1943-%22|title = OCLC Classify -- an Experimental Classification Service}}

Education

Miller attended Whitman College, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1969.{{MathGenealogy|id=28223}}

Research and career

He joined Penn State in September 1985. Prior to that, he had held a position as permanent staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and served on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Arizona. He is a fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology).

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.{{Cite journal

| last1 = Altschul | first1 = S.

| authorlink1 = Stephen Altschul

| last2 = Gish | first2 = W.

| authorlink2 = Warren Gish

| last3 = Miller | first3 = W.

| authorlink3 = Webb Miller

| last4 = Myers | first4 = E.

| authorlink4 = Eugene Myers

| last5 = Lipman | first5 = D.

| authorlink5 = David J. Lipman

| title = Basic Local Alignment Search Tool

| doi = 10.1016/S0022-2836(05)80360-2

| journal = Journal of Molecular Biology

| volume = 215

| issue = 3

| pages = 403–410

| year = 1990

| pmid = 2231712

| pmc =

| s2cid = 14441902

}}{{Cite journal | last1 = Altschul | first1 = S. | authorlink1 = Stephen Altschul| last2 = Madden | first2 = T. L. | last3 = Schäffer | first3 = A. A. | last4 = Zhang | first4 = J. | last5 = Zhang | first5 = Z. | last6 = Miller | first6 = W. | authorlink6 = Webb Miller| last7 = Lipman | first7 = D. J. | authorlink7 = David J. Lipman| title = Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: A new generation of protein database search programs | doi = 10.1093/nar/25.17.3389 | journal = Nucleic Acids Research | volume = 25 | issue = 17 | pages = 3389–3402 | year = 1997 | pmid = 9254694| pmc =146917 }} 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.

Webb Miller's recent research interests{{AcademicSearch|2314571}} {{dead link|date=March 2017}}{{DBLP|name=Webb Miller}} 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 that described a draft sequence for the woolly mammoth genome.{{Cite journal|last1=Miller |first1=W. |authorlink1=Webb Miller |last2=Drautz |first2=D. I. |last3=Ratan |first3=A. |last4=Pusey |first4=B. |last5=Qi |first5=J. |last6=Lesk |first6=A. M. |last7=Tomsho |first7=L. P. |last8=Packard |first8=M. D. |last9=Zhao |first9=F. |last10=Sher |doi=10.1038/nature07446 |first10=A. |last11=Tikhonov |first11=A. |last12=Raney |first12=B. |last13=Patterson |first13=N. |last14=Lindblad-Toh |first14=K. |last15=Lander |first15=E. S. |last16=Knight |first16=J. R. |last17=Irzyk |first17=G. P. |last18=Fredrikson |first18=K. M. |last19=Harkins |first19=T. T. |last20=Sheridan |first20=S. |last21=Pringle |first21=T. |last22=Schuster |first22=S. C. |title=Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth |journal=Nature |volume=456 |issue=7220 |pages=387–390 |year=2008 |pmid=19020620 |bibcode=2008Natur.456..387M |s2cid=4425232 |doi-access=free }}

Awards

Miller was awarded the ISCB Senior Scientist Award and elected an ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology in 2009. He is also among The 2009 Time 100. Together with Gene Myers, he received the Inaugural IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal{{Cite web|title=Current IEEE Corporate Award Recipients|url=https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/recipients/current-recipients/|access-date=2021-11-29|website=IEEE Awards|language=en-US}} "for pioneering contributions to sequence analysis algorithms and their applications to biosequence search, genome sequencing, and comparative genome analyses".

References