portrait

Steven Salzberg, PhD


Fellow


Baltimore, Maryland, USA




Steven Salzberg, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine in the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biostatistics and Computer Science.  He has written about pseudoscience in medicine in his popular blog Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience. He also writes a column for Forbes on pseudoscience.

From 2005-2011, Dr Salzberg was the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.  From 1997-2005 he was Senior Director of Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, one of the world’s leading DNA sequencing centers at the time. 

Dr Salzberg received a master’s degree in Computer Science from Yale University and a doctorate in Computer Science from Harvard University.  He joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1989.  He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996, and become a Research Professor in 1999, after joining TIGR.

Interest in the human genome project motivated Dr Salzberg to develop one of the first computational gene-finding systems for the human genome in the early 1990s.  His initial collaborations with TIGR at that time led to the development of a gene-finding program (Glimmer) that has subsequently been used in the analysis of hundreds of bacterial, archaea, viruses and other organisms.  He was a co-founder of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, the first large-scale genomics study of human and avian influenza viruses. He continues to pioneer several next-generation sequencing applications.

Dr Salzberg has authored or co-authored two books and over 200 publications in leading scientific journals.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a former member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH.  He currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Genome Research, Genome Biology, BMC Biology, Journal of Computational Biology, PLoS ONE, BMC Genomics, BMC Bioinformatics, and Biology Direct, and he is a member of the Faculty of 1000 (post-publication peer review).   He co-chaired the Third through the Eighth (1999-2005) Conferences on Computational Genomics, the 2007 and 2009 International Conferences on Microbial Genomics, and the 2009 Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics.

Selected Blogging:


Selected Presentations:

  • “Autism & vaccines: How bad science confuses the press & harms the public,” National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, 2008 Nov 8. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)




In the News:


The Online Steven Salzberg:

Forbes logo

Genomics Blog logo

PLOS-Influenza logo

Faculty of 1000 logo

Johns Hopkins Medical School logo

CBCB logo
Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Wikipedia logo