13 Facts About Ron Shamir

Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology.

Ron Shamir holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.

Ron Shamir was born in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1953, the eldest son of Varda and Raphael Shamir.

Ron Shamir later worked with Dorit S Hochbaum on efficient algorithms for structured optimization problems.

Ron Shamir used his expertise in graph theory to develop clustering algorithms for analyzing gene expression problems.

Ron Shamir's CAST algorithm, with Zohar Yakhini and Amir Ben-Dor was published in 1999 and drew a lot of attention from the bioinformatics community; the techniques described in the paper became popular for analyzing genomic data.

Ron Shamir broadened his research to include additional aspects of bioinformatics, such as analysis of biological networks, genome rearrangements, sequence motif finding, and transcriptional regulation.

Ron Shamir was on the founding steering committee of the RECOMB meeting, the premier theoretical conference in bioinformatics, and served on it for thirteen years.

Ron Shamir co-founded the Israeli Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and was society president from 2004 to 2006.

Ron Shamir is the head of the Edmond J Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel-Aviv University and holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics.

Ron Shamir developed extensive lecture notes which are in broad use on Computational Genomics and on Analysis of Gene Expression, DNA Chips and Gene Networks.

Ron Shamir co-edited the book "Bioinformatics for Biologists" with Pavel A Pevzner.

Ron Shamir has mentored more than 80 graduate students and postdocs, many of whom developed impressive careers in academia and the industry.