Ben Langmead

I am a Masters student in the Computer Science Department and CBCB and will graudate in Spring 2009. My advisors are Mihai Pop and Steven Salzberg.

As a graduate student, I am leveraging my background in high-speed software and hardware for network security into research toward high-performance solutions for modern biosequence analysis problems, especially the short read alignment problem. Most recently, I wrote and released an extremely efficient short read aligner, Bowtie, in collaboration with Cole Trapnell, another CBCB graduate student.

I received my B.A. in Computer Science from Columbia University in June 2003. After earning my B.A., I worked for over 4 years at Reservoir Labs, a small Computer Science R&D firm in New York. While there I worked for a diverse set of clients contributing expertise in high-performance software and compilers. Most significantly, I lead the technical side of an effort funded by Department of Energy to design and create R-Scope, a commercially-viable 10 Gbps network intrusion detection appliance running on a parallel, off-the-shelf network processor called Octeon.

Completed Courses

• CMSC 631 (Program Analysis and Understanding) Fall 2007
• CMSC 828N (Computational Gene Finding and Genome Assembly) Fall 2007
• CMSC 838F (Language-Based Security) Spring 2008
• CMSC 838P (Algorithms for Biosequence Analysis) Spring 2008
• Master's Thesis Research (3 pts)

Current Courses

• BIOM 601 (Biostatistics I) Fall 2008
• CMSC 740 (Advanced Computer Graphics) Fall 2008
• Master's Thesis Research (3 pts)