CSE Prof. Pavel Pevzner is one of only eight new members elected to the Informatics section of the Academia Europaea, Europe's equivalent to the combined U.S. National Academies. The Academia Europaea elected 172 new members from four major areas, including humanities, social and related sciences, exact sciences and life sciences. Pevzner is one of only five U.S.-based academics elected to be new foreign members this year. While his primary appointment is at UC San Diego, he founded a bioinformatics group in Saint Petersburg, Russia during his sabbatical in 2011/2012. This group, now housed at the Center for Algorithmic Biotechnology at Saint Petersburg State University, has developed the leading genome assembler SPAdes.
At UC San Diego, Pevzner directs the NIH National Technology Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry and he has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor since 2006. Pevzner also holds the Ronald R. Taylor endowed chair in computer science. He joined the CSE faculty in 2000 following earlier professorships at USC (1995-2000) and Pennsylvania State University (1992-1995). Among other honors, Pevzner is a Fellow of ACM and of the International Society for Computational Biology. In 2007 he also received the UC San Diego Chancellor's Associates Award for Excellence in Research. Pevzner is best known for his scholarship in algorithms and software tools for genome assembly, genome rearrangement, computational proteomics, as well as antibody sequencing.
Pevzner and CSE Prof. Victor Vianu are the only UC San Diego professors elected to the academy.
Formed in 1988, the Academia Europaea is the pan-European academy of science, humanities and letters, with a membership of over 3,500 eminent scholars, drawn from all countries of Europe, and all disciplines, nationalities and geographical locations.