Dr. Michael Waterman holds an Endowed Associates Chair at USC. He came to University of Southern California. He came to USC in 1982 after positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University. He has a bachelor¡¯s degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University, and a PhD in Statistics and Probability from Michigan State University. Michael Waterman was named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the National Academy of Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Engineering (2012). Also he is a elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1991), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009) and International Society of Computational Biology (2009). In fall 2000 he became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. Waterman received a Gairdner Foundation International Award (2002), the Friendship Award from the Chinese government (2013) and the Dan David Prize (2015). He is an elected Foreign Member of the French Acad¨¦mie des Sciences (2005) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013). He received Doctor Philosophiae Honors Causia from Tel Aviv University (2011) and Southern Denmark University (2013).

From May 2008 to May 2014, in addition to his USC appointment Michael Waterman became Chair Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  He led a team of distinguished scientists which collectively worked to enhance Tsinghua's programs in bioinformatics and computational biology. Currently he is Cao Xingcheng Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and Distinguished Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Michael Waterman is a founding editor of Journal of Computational Biology and is on the editorial board of several journals. He is the author of Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes and is a co-author of the text Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction. Also with Istrail and Pevzner in 1997 he began the international conference Research in Computational Biology (RECOMB).

Professor Waterman works in the area of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, concentrating on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping. His paper with Idury in 1995 introduced the use of Eulerian and De Bruijn graphs for sequence assembly.

  • Dr. Lee-Jen Wei is a Professor ofBiostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School Of Public Health, and Associate Director of the Pediatric AIDS Data Center of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. L.J. Wei¡¯s research is in the area of developing statistical methods for the design and analysis of clinical trials. In 1977-78 he introduced the ¡°urn design¡± for two-arm sequential clinical studies. This design has been utilized in several large-scaled multi-center trials, for example, the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial sponsored by the NIH and the Matching patients to Alcoholism Treatments sponsored by NIAAA.
  • In 1979, he proposed a response adaptive design, a randomized version of Marvin Zelen¡¯s play the winner rule, was used in the ECMO trial, a well-known study which evaluated extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for treating newborns with persistent pulmonary hypertension. Currently several trials sponsored by private industry are using this particular design to relax the ethical problem arising in using the conventional 50-50 randomization treatment allocation rule clinical studies. To monitor trials sequentially for economic and ethical reasons, in 1982 Wei and his colleagues presented a rather flexible monitoring scheme, which has become a classical reference for the literature in interim analysis for clinical trials.

    Dr. Wei has developed numerous methods for analyzing data with multiple outcome or repeated measurements obtained from study subjects. In particular, his ¡°multivariate Cox procedures¡± to handle multiple event times have become quite popular. He and his colleagues are also responsible for developing alternative models to the Cox proportional hazards model for analyzing survival observations.

    A very important issue in statistical inference is to check whether the model used to fit the data is appropriate or not. Currently, Wei and his colleagues are developing graphical and numerical methods for checking the adequacy of the Cox proportional hazards model, other semi-parametric survival models, parametric models, and random effects models for repeated measurements. The new procedures are much less subjective than the conventional eye-ball methods based on ordinary residuals plots.


Professor Wei was named ¡°Statistician of the Year¡± in 2007 by the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association.The American Statistical Association gave him the Wilks Memorial Award in 2009 "for statistical methods used in clinical trials.", which is one of the most prestigious awards among all the international statistical societies.