Pavel Pevzner

The life sciences have been transformed by the ability to rapidly sequence and assemble genomes for organisms from extant and extinct species and use these assembled genomes to answer fundamental and applied questions in biology, medicine, and other sciences. Pavel Pevzner has been at the forefront of this transformation.

Dr. Pevzner has made fundamental contributions to the theoretical study of string algorithms and to their application to scalable reconstruction of genomes and other biological sequences such as antibodies and antibiotics. Early automated genome assemblers lacked the efficiency needed to process the rapidly growing datasets enabled by new sequencing technologies. In a series of papers starting in 1989, Pevzner developed models based on de Bruin graphs that led to algorithms that were both accurate and significantly more efficient. His work has tremendous practical impact on modern biology: his algorithms underlie almost all sequence assemblers used today and were used to reconstruct the vast majority of genomic sequences available in databases.