Dr. Lior Pachter is a former BIDS Senior Fellow, and now a Professor of Computational Biology and Computing and Mathematical Sciences in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at CalTech. His work focused on computational biology in genomics, as well as mathematics, molecular and cell biology, and electrical engineering and computer science. His career began in comparative genomics, and initially in genome alignment, annotation, and the determination of conserved regions using phylogenetic methods. He contributed to the mouse, rat, chicken, and fly genome-sequencing consortia and the pilot phase of the ENCODE project. More recently, he has become focused on functional genomics, which includes answering questions about the function and interaction of DNA, RNA, and protein products. He's particularly interested in applications of high-throughput sequencing to RNA biology. Genomics requires the development of algorithms, statistical methodology, and mathematical foundations, and a major part of his research focuses on methods. His views on the role of computational methods in genomics are explained in his keynote talk at the 2013 CSHL meeting on genome informatics titled "Stories from the Supplement."