Nominee: Jérôme Waldispühl
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University
Brief Biosketch provided for the nominee:
Jérôme Waldispühl is an associate professor of Computer Science at McGill University, where he conducts research in RNA structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics. He develops combinatorial algorithms and machine learning frameworks to predict RNA 3D structures and their binding to small molecules. He also contributed to pioneer the use of video games to engage the public in genomic data analysis with Phylo (2010), Colony B (2016), Borderlands Science (2020) and Project Discovery Phase 3 (2020), which have gathered millions of citizen scientists worldwide. He presented this research at the White House OSTP (2013), Québec Parliament (2016), and French Academy of Science (2018).
Jérôme Waldispühl holds a PhD in Computer Science (2004) from École Polytechnique (France). Before joining McGill in 2009, he was an instructor in Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006-2009) and did a postdoc in the biology department at Boston College (2005-2006). He is a recipient of the Tomlinson Scientist Award (2012,2022) and the Fessenden Professorship in Science Innovation (2013, 2023), as well as a co-recipient of the Webby People’s Voice Award for “Public Service, Activism, and Social Impact” (2021).
Justification provided for the nominee:
I would like to advocate for the use/integration of computational methods & citizen science for RNA biology.