David_Sankoff
David Sankoff
Canadian scientist
David Sankoff (born December 31, 1942) is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge)[6] and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals.[7][8][9][10] Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics.[3] He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming[11] for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words,[2] "Michael Waterman and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."