Biography

John Kececioglu is a Professor of Computer Science and the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, which he joined in 2000. John did his PhD with Gene Myers, and his postdoctoral study with David Sankoff and Dan Gusfield.

His research is in applied algorithms, especially for bioinformatics and computational biology, and also for computational astronomy, on topics including

• reaction pathway inference,
• multiple sequence alignment,
• parameter advising,
• protein structure prediction,
• sequence assembly,
• genome rearrangement, and
• astronomical rare event detection.

• Freeia, a tool for optimal metabolic factories,
• Mmunin, a tool for shortest hyperpaths in directed hypergraphs,
• Hhugin, a tool for fast heuristic hyperpaths,
• Nnessy, a tool for protein secondary structure prediction,
• Ssylla, a tool for ensemble prediction of protein structure,
• Opal, a tool for multiple sequence alignment,
• Facet, a tool for alignment accuracy estimation,
• InverseOpt, a library for inverse parametric optimization,
• Ipa, a tool for inverse sequence alignment, and
• AlignAlign, a tool for optimally aligning alignments.

John is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, is on the Editorial Board of Algorithms for Molecular Biology, and has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and as a Faculty Member in the Sequence Analysis Section of Faculty of 1000. He was Program Committee Co-Chair for ACM-BCB 2016, Program Committee Track Co-Chair in Sequence Analysis for ISMB 2011, and Conference Chair for RECOMB 2009. John served as Associate Head of the Department of Computer Science during 2012.

A book coauthored by John and his former PhD student Dan DeBlasio on parameter advising has been published by Springer, and is available on Amazon.

A news article on John and his collaborators' research in computational astronomy appeared on the front page of the Arizona Daily Star. (An artist's conception of their work is in this comic.)