On Thursday, July 24th at 11:30 in Engineering Room 301, Bill Pearson, of the University of Virginia will present a talk on what can be learned from protein comparisons.

A broad introduction to the topic of protein evolution, recommended to me by Bill Pearson is available at This page

The following information is reproduced almost verbatim from an email correspondence with Mr. Pearson for the express purpose of providing some general knowledge to those interested in his presentation.

Pearson's Education
Bill Pearson was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Chemistry from 1967 - 1971, and then went to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, receiving his Ph.D. from the Biology Dept. In 1977 he finished his thesis, "Repeated Sequences in DNA." After a short post-doctoral fellowship at Caltech, he went to the Dept. of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins, where he worked from 1978 - 1983. In 1983, he started as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the U. of Virginia.

Pearson's Research
Pearson began research in Molecular Biology during his sophomore year in college. Intrigued by DNA structure and the control of gene expression, he chose the California Institute of Technology for graduate school. At Cal. Tech, during his post-doctoral fellowship, Pearson acquired a "subject minor" in Computer Science. And in his words, "almost immediately began being a computational biologist," writing several programs which figured heavily in his early papers.
During his first few months at the University of Virginia, Pearson wrote the original FASTP program, which later evolved into the, now famous, FASTA.

His talk will center on what can be learned from mining a protein sequence comparison.
If you have any questions regarding this page please contact Peter Likarish If you are interested in learning more about Mr. Pearson's research, please visit his personal webpage