Dr. Steven Salzberg is the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.  From 1997 to 2005 he was at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, where he was the Senior Director of Bioinformatics, and he continues to hold an adjunct appointment there.  During that time he was also a Research Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  

Dr. Salzberg received his B.A. degree in English and M.S. and M.Phil. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University.  Following his Ph.D. studies, he joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1989.  He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996, and to Research Professor in 1999.   In 1997 he joined TIGR as an Investigator in the Bioinformatics Department, and he assumed the role of Director of Bioinformatics in 1998.

Before switching to bioinformatics and genomics, Dr. Salzberg's research focused on machine learning and its applications to fields ranging from astronomy to molecular biology.  His interest in the human genome project motivated him to develop one of the first computational gene-finding systems for the human genome in the early 1990s.  His initial collaborations with TIGR at that time led to the development of a gene-finding program that was subsequently used in the analysis of the bacterial genomes of Borrelia burgdorferi (the Lyme disease bacterium), Treponema pallidum (the syphilis bacterium), Mycobacterium tuberculosis , Vibrio cholerae , Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), and over 50 more bacterial and viral organisms that have been sequenced since then.  Dr. Salzberg and his research team developed a eukaryotic gene finder, first used for Plasmodium falciparum , the malaria parasite, and later adapted for the human genome, the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana , rice, Cryptococcus neoformans, Brugia malayi , and others.  His group has also developed systems for large-scale genome sequence alignment and genome assembly, and they are currently working on an open-source genome assembler, AMOS.  Their open-source systems have been distributed to thousands of scientific laboratories around the globe.  In addition to his software systems, Salzberg has contributed analyses to many genome sequencing projects, using computational methods to analyze genome duplications, rearrangements, and other evolutionary phenomena in a wide range of organisms.  His current genomics projects include sequencing and analysis of multiple strains of  Bacillus anthracis and of the human influenza A virus.

Dr. Salzberg has authored or co-authored two books and over 125 publications in leading scientific journals.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Bioinformatics, BMC Biology, Journal of Computational Biology , BMC Genomics, BMC Bioinformatics, and Applied Bioinformatics .   He has co-chaired the Third (1999) through the Eighth (2005) Conferences on Computational Genomics.