imgres-2Benjamin Langmead, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been selected as a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational & Molecular Biology for his work in the analysis of DNA sequencing data.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 126 two-year fellowships each year to early career researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and unique potential to make substantial contributions to their fields. The award is $50,000 distributed over a two-year period. Winners are nominated by a department chair or senior researcher. Since the fellowships were established in 1955, 38 recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes in their fields.

Langmead said he appreciated the support of the Sloan Foundation and is excited about taking his lab in “new directions” because of the award.

“In my lab, we focus on making large life science datasets easy for everyday researchers to use,” Langmead said. “The fellowship allows us to pursue new research priorities related to analysis of DNA sequencing data. Specifically, we will study new ways of enhancing the accuracy of common sequence analysis tools. We will also study ways of making it easy to analyze many publicly available sequencing datasets at once. Progress in these areas will allow scientists to marshal more data and more statistical power in their study of biology and disease.”

Langmead was a research associate for three years in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health before becoming an assistant professor in 2012. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland College Park in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

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