About ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award

Pavel Pevzner, a professor at the University of California San Diego, receives the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for pioneering contributions to the theory, design and implementation of algorithms for string reconstruction and to their applications in the assembly of genomes.

Pevzner’s research interests span the field of computational biology, and his work has been guided by tailoring algorithmic ideas to biological problems. The life sciences have been transformed by the ability to rapidly sequence and assemble genomes for organisms from existing and extant species and use these assembled genomes to answer fundamental and applied questions in biology, medicine and other sciences. 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. Pevzner’s algorithms underlie almost all sequence assemblers used today and were used to reconstruct the vast majority of genomic sequences available in databases.

The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. This award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.