Richard H. Lathrop, Ph.D., is a professor in the
Computer Science Department (ICS)
of the
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS)
at the
University of California, Irvine (UCI).
He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
in
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and afterwards was first a post-doc and then
a research scientist at the
MIT AI Lab.
He also holds graduate degrees in electrical engineering
and in computer science from
MIT,
and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from
Reed College.
Dr. Lathrop's research for the last 15 years has involved applying
intelligent systems and advanced computation to problems in molecular
biology. He has broad interests in computational molecular biology,
including current research interests in protein structure prediction
from sequence, protein-DNA interactions and genetic regulation,
rational drug design and discovery, and other molecular
structure/function relationships. He also has broad interests in
intelligent systems, especially machine learning, constraint systems,
and optimal heuristic search. Recently he has begun to explore DNA
self-assembly, with applications to nanotechnology and biotechnology.
Nick Steffen, then Dr. Lathrop's graduate student, and Miriam Raphael
and Sophia Deeds-Rubin, then Dr. Lathrop's undergraduate students,
shared in the 1998 AAAI/IAAI
Innovative Application Award
and the 1999 cover of
AI Magazine.
Nick Steffen, then Dr. Lathrop's graduate student, and Anton Sazhin
and Ye Sun, then Dr. Lathrop's graduate students co-advised with
Dr. Irani, shared in the Best Paper Award
at the 2001 Genome Informatics Conference.
Mac Casale, then Dr. Lathrop's graduate
student co-advised with Dr. Eppstein, won the
Best Student Paper Presentation
award at the 1998 ISMB Conference.
Dr. Lathrop was a
co-founding scientist
of
CODA Genomics, Inc.,
(CODA renamed itself
to Verdezyne Inc.
in 2008)
and of
Arris Pharmaceutical Corp.
(Arris merged with Sequana to form
AxyS Pharmaceuticals in Jan., 1998, which was acquired by
Celera Therapeutics in Nov., 2001).
He was on the
Scientific Advisory Boards of CombiChem, Inc.
(now
DuPont Pharmaceuticals Research Labs)
and of
GeneFormatics, Inc. (now defunct).
He is on the Editorial Boards of
J. Molecular and Cellular Proteomics
and
IEEE Intelligent Systems.
He has published over 75
scientific and technical papers.
His research has
appeared on the covers of
Communications of the ACM (1987),
the
Journal of
Molecular Biology (1996),
and
AI Magazine (1999).
He is a co-inventor of
US Patents No. 7,262,031
(``Method for Producing a Synthetic Gene or Other DNA Sequence'')
and
5,526,281
("Machine Learning Approach to Modeling
Biological Activity for Molecular Design and to Modeling Other
Characteristics").
His Ph.D. thesis ("Efficient Methods for Massively Parallel
Symbolic Induction: Algorithms and Implementation") received
MIT's EECS
George M. Sprowl
departmental award and was nominated by MIT for the ACM
Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation award (1990).
He was elected to
Phi Beta Kappa
(the national academic honor society)
and to
Sigma Xi
(the national scientific research society).
His biography
is listed in
"Who's Who in the World 2002."
He has been
licensed as a
nuclear reactor operator
by the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission (1977). His
GRE scores
are in the
99th percentiles of all three
categories simultaneously: Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytic.
He has received
Best Paper Awards at the
ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (1987)
and the
International Conference on Genome Informatics (2001),
a
Graduate Fellowship (1980)
and a
CAREER grant award (1996)
from the National Science Foundation (NSF),
UCI/ICS's Departmental
Outstanding Faculty Award (1997),
UCI's
Excellence in Teaching Award
for undergraduate teaching (1998),
the ICS
Dean's Award for Undergraduate Teaching
(2009), an
Innovative Application Award
at the AAAI/IAAI Conference (1998), an
Innovation Award
from UCI (2005),
and Certificates of Appreciation from
MathCounts,
the US National Institutes of Health, and the
International Society for Computational Biology
(of which he was the founding Treasurer and a
member of the founding Board of Directors).
Dr. Lathrop is
affiliated with the ICS Ph.D. concentrations in
Informatics in Biology and Medicine
and
Artificial Intelligence. He is the
Director of the undergraduate ICS
Honors Program. His current course offerings include
ICS-H197, "Honors Seminar".
Dr. Lathrop adheres scrupulously to the
UCI Senate Academic Honesty Policies
and the
ICS Department's Cheating Policy.
Any student who
engages in cheating, plagiarism, or
collusion in dishonest activities, will receive an academic evaluation
of "F" for the entire course with a letter of explanation to the
student's permanent file. The ICS
Student Affairs Office
will be involved
at every step of the process.
Dr. Lathrop seeks to create a level playing
field for all students.
Return to Richard H. Lathrop's home page.