2016 ISCB Innovator Award: Serafim Batzoglou

2016 marks the awarding of the inaugural ISCB Innovator Award, which honors an ISCB scientist who is within two decades of receiving a graduate degree, has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field, and continues to forge new directions. The inaugural winner is Dr. Serafim Batzoglou (Fig 1), Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Batzoglou will receive his award and deliver a keynote address at ISMB 2016 in Orlando, Florida, on July 12, 2016, to mark this honor. Batzoglou remembers having an early fascination with numbers and a sense of wonder about the universe around him as a young child. He recalls, “I was interested in math and science for as long as I can remember. Before going to preschool, I remember counting and adding large numbers as well as wondering how big space is and where it ends.” Batzoglou’s curiosity was stoked by other cultural touchstones, including the novels of Jules Verne and Carl Sagan’s captivating Cosmos television series. These early experiences nurtured his interests in math, physics, and computer science, and Batzoglou went on to earn two bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Batzoglou also encountered computational biology for the first time as an undergraduate. He says, “Upon entering college, I was deciding between two fields of study that had fascinated me during high school: astrophysics and artificial intelligence (AI). However, during the early 90s, I felt that neither physics nor artificial intelligence was experiencing any exciting growth. At least, that was my impression around 1995, when I had been admitted to a PhD program in computer science at MIT and was deciding on an area to focus on. I took Bonnie Berger and David Gifford’s class on computational biology and felt that this was a research area with great potential where I could apply my computer science background to do science (rather than engineering).” Batzoglou credits his early mentors for giving him invaluable undergraduate research experiences, including Sorin Istrail, with whom he had a very enjoyable research summer during 1997, and his undergraduate research supervisor David McAllester.