The Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Dmitry Korkin as Director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) program. Dr. Korkin succeeds Liz Ryder, who has been Director of the BCB program since 2013 and who will now serve in the role of Associate Program Director. The Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences would like to thank Dr. Ryder for her leadership and service as Director. During her tenure, Dr. Ryder was instrumental in launching the PhD program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in 2015. In addition, she oversaw significant growth in the number of undergraduate students majoring in BCB as well as graduate students in the program, and increases in external research funding and the number of faculty affiliated with the program. As part of her outreach efforts, Dr. Ryder oversaw initiation of the BCB Summer Research Experience for high school students.
Dr. Korkin joined WPI in August 2014. Before coming to WPI, he was an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the core faculty of MU Informatics Institute. He was also the first Associate Director of graduate studies in bioinformatics, as a part of the Institute’s interdisciplinary program in informatics. Dr. Korkin is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the University of Missouri Junior Engineering Research Faculty of the Year award. His research is in the areas of bioinformatics of disease, computational genomics, machine learning and biomedical data visualization. Before joining the University of Missouri, Dr. Korkin did his postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco and Rockefeller University. He has served as an editorial board member in Nature Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, and International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. Dr. Korkin’s research has been published in Nature, Nature Communications, Proceedings of National Academy of Science, and other peer-reviewed journals and conferences.