Richard Lathrop
Professor Lathrop received his B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College and his S.M. in Computer Science, E.E. in Electrical Engineering, and Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from MIT. He was a research scientist at the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory before joining the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he is now a Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (DBSICS). His research involves applying advanced computation and intelligent systems to problems in biology and medicine. He was a cofounder of Arris Pharmaceutical Corp. (subsequently Axys Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; now part of Celera Genomics Group); a co-founder of CODA Genomics, Inc. (now Verdezyne, Inc.); a cofounder of Actavalon, Inc.; and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of CombiChem, Inc. (now part of DuPont Pharmaceuticals Research Laboratories), and Geneformatics, Inc. He has received Best Paper Awards from the Intl. Conf. on Genome Informatics and the ACM/IEEE Intl. Design Automation Conf.; an Innovative Application Award from the AAAI/IAAI Conf.; a Graduate Fellowship and a CAREER grant award from the National Science Foundation; an Innovation Award from UCI; and a Research Award for Discovery from the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a co-inventor on US Patents No. 5,526,281 (“Machine Learning Approach to Modeling Biological Activity for Molecular Design and to Modeling Other Characteristics”) and No. 7,262,031 (“Method for Producing a Synthetic Gene or Other DNA Sequence”). He proved that protein threading is NP-complete and the Halting Problem is formally learnable. His research has been on the cover of AI Magazine, J. of Molecular Biology, and Communications of the ACM.
Professor Lathrop was the founding Treasurer of the Intl. Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and currently serves on their Board of Directors. As Chair of the ISCB Public Affairs Committee he oversaw the development and adoption of the “ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature.” He was Guest Editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems special issue on “Intelligent Systems and Molecular Biology I & II.” He was Chair of the NIH “BioData Management and Analysis” study section and also Chair of the NIH special review panel on “Big Data to Knowledge: Targeted Software.” He has served on numerous Organizing and Program Committees of the ISMB Conference. He is a Life Member of AAAI and ISCB.
Professor Lathrop has been named “UCI Professor of the Year” at the annual UCI Celebration of Teaching. He has been awarded the UCI Chancellor’s Award for Fostering Undergraduate Research; the DBSICS Dean’s award for Excellence in Teaching; the UCI Excellence in Teaching Award for undergraduate teaching; and the ICS Department Outstanding Faculty Award for research and teaching. He is Director of the undergraduate Honors Program for DBSICS and serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. On a scale where 6 is Very Good and 9 is Excellent, student evaluation of teaching in his lecture classes uniformly scores a median of between 8 and 9 on “What overall evaluation would you give this instructor?”
Education
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990