Carl Kingsford

Carl Kingsford is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB), part of the University's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2005 and has been an assistant professor at Maryland since 2007.

His main research interests are the development and application of optimization and graph algorithms to answer biological questions using large collections of biological measurements. He has been exploring key problems within computational systems biology and genomics, such as predicting protein function, reconstructing ancient biological pathways, and improving genome assembly. He has authored or co-authored of over 25 scientific publications, and he and his collaborators have developed several widely-used bioinformatics analysis software packages, including GIRAF (for influenza reassortment detection), JELLYFISH (for fast parallel k-mer counting), and TransTermHP (to identify Rho-independent transcription terminators). In 2011, he won a NSF CAREER award, and he won a CS Department Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2010. In 2008, he was named one of 30 "Tomorrow's PIs" by Genome Technology Magazine.

He has served on the program committees for several major computational biology conferences and served as an area co-chair for the 20th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in 2012.