Richard H. Lathrop, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Information and Computer Science Department (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 a degree in computer science and a degree in electrical engineering from MIT, and a 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 Arris Pharmaceutical Corp. (Arris merged with Sequana to form AxyS Pharmaceuticals in Jan., 1998, which was acquired by Celera Therapeutics in Nov., 2001), and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of CombiChem, Inc. (now DuPont Pharmaceuticals Research Labs), of GeneFormatics, Inc., and of the University of Colorado's Center for Computational Biology. He is on the Editorial Boards of J. Molecular and Cellular Proteomics and IEEE Intelligent Systems. He has published over 50 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 Patent No. 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), 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 Intl. Soc. for Computational Biology
Dr. Lathrop is
affiliated with the ICS Ph.D. concentrations in
