Brief biography of Lior Pachter
Lior Pachter was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa where he attended Pretoria Boys High School. After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech in 1994, he left for MIT where he was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics in 1999. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he was a postdoctoral researcher (1999-2001), assistant professor (2001-2005), associate professor (2005-2009), and is currently professor of mathematics and molecular and cellular biology with a joint appointment in computer science.

His research interests span the mathematical and biological sciences, and he has authored over 90 research articles in the areas of algorithms, combinatorics, comparative genomics, algebraic statistics, molecular biology and evolution. His honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Miller Professorship, and a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for the development of widely used sequence alignment software.

He is married to Ingileif B. Hallgrímsdóttir.