Dr. Gary Benson is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Biology and a core faculty member of the Boston University Bioinformatics graduate program. He is the director of the NSF funded BU Bioinformatics IGERT graduate training grant which was awarded in the summer of 2007. Dr. Benson received his PhD in 1992 in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California from 1992-1994. He worked for 9 years as a faculty member in the Department of Biomathematical Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. Dr. Benson's area of expertise is pattern matching and pattern detection, especially as it applies to DNA sequence analysis. He also has extensive experience in biological database development. Before graduate school, Dr. Benson was a high school mathematics teacher for 8 years and as a result, he is very active in research mentorship for high school students and high school curriculum development. Dr. Benson is the editor of the annual Web Server issue of Nucleic Acids Research. He was the local chairman for RECOMB 98 (the Second International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology) in New York and was Program Committee Co-Chairman for WABI 2003 (the 3rd Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics) in Budapest. He was also an instructor in the Third International Summer School on Computational Biology at Warsaw University in August/September 2003.[ Personal page ]

Yevgeniy Gelfand is a systems software developer at Boston University. He works mostly in computational genomics, as well as in database interfacing and web development.

Denise Mak is a PhD Bioinformatics student in Dr. Benson's lab working on indel seeds with applications towards inverted repeats and RNA secondary structure prediction focusing on the Hepatitis C viral genome. She received her Masters in Bioinformatics from Boston University in 2005 and a Bachelors in Mathematics (Computer Science) from the University of Waterloo in 2002. She has presented her work at ISMB 2006 and, most recently, at APBC 2007.