Gary Stormo

Gary Stormo (born 1950) is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression. Consensus sequence had previously been used to represent patterns in biological sequences, but had difficulties in the prediction of new occurrences of these patterns. The first use of PWMs was in the discovery of RNA sites that function as translation initiation sites. The advantages of PWMs over consensus sequences have made PWMs a popular method for representing patterns in biological sequences and an essential component in modern algorithms for motif discovery.

He has published over 150 scientific papers. He was elected as a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2001.

Stormo was Executive Editor of the journal Bioinformatics from 1994 to 1999. Stormo has also served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal PLOS Computational Biology. He is currently co-editor of the journal Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.