Sorin Istrail is * the Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science, and former Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University. Before joining Brown, he was the Senior Director and then Head of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics, where his group played a central role in the construction of the Sequence of the Human Genome; they co-authored the 2001 Science paper The Sequence of the Human Genome, which, with over 12,000 citations to date, is one of the most cited scientific paper. His group at Celera Genomics also built a powerful suite of genome-wide algorithms that was used for the comparison of all human genome assemblies to date. In 2002 his Celera group in collaboration with the company ClearForrest won the ACM KDD Cup the top international data mining/machine learning competition the challenge then was the automatic annotation of a section of the Drosophila genome. In 2003 he joined the ranks of Applied Biosystems Science Fellows, one of just six Science Fellows in a company of 800 scientists. Before Celera, Professor Istrail founded and led the Computational Biology Project at Sandia National Laboratories (1992-2000). In 2000, he obtained the negative solution (computational intractability) of a 50 years old unresolved problem in statistical mechanics, the Three-Dimensional Ising Model Problem. This work was included in the Top 100 Most Important Discoveries of the U.S. Department of Energys first 25 years, and as the 7th top achievement of DOE in Advanced Scientific Computing. Professor Istrail's research focuses on computational molecular biology, human genetics and genome-wide associations studies, medical bioinformatics of autism, multiple sclerosis, HIV, preterm labor and viral immunology, algorithms and computational complexity, and statistical physics. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology, and together with Pavel Pevzner and Mike Waterman, he is co-founder with of the RECOMB Conference series, and co-Editor of the MIT Press Computational Molecular Biology series and of co-Editor of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series. He is Professor Honoris Causa of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania.He has Erdos number 2 and postcard-Erdos number 1. He has 9 links to Euler and 11 links to Leibniz (in the PhD advisor genealogy).