Sean Eddy is a distinguished computational biologist renowned for his pioneering contributions to genomic sequence analysis. He currently serves as the Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology at Harvard University and holds a concurrent appointment as Professor of Applied Mathematics. As an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2000, Eddy has established himself as a leading figure in computational biology with a career spanning over two decades of impactful research. Prior to his appointment at Harvard in 2015, he spent nine years as a group leader at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus and eleven years as a faculty member in the Department of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. Eddy received his bachelor's degree from Caltech and completed his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Colorado Boulder under Larry Gold in 1991, followed by postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
Eddy's groundbreaking research has fundamentally transformed the field of bioinformatics through his development of sophisticated computational algorithms and software tools for biological sequence analysis. He is the principal author of the widely used HMMER and Infernal software suites, which have become indispensable resources for identifying remote evolutionary relationships between distantly related protein and RNA sequences. His influential 1998 book Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids coauthored with Richard Durbin, Anders Krogh, and Graeme Mitchison has served as the definitive text in the field for over two decades. Eddy's work on hidden Markov models and Bayesian probabilistic inference approaches has enabled researchers worldwide to decipher the evolutionary history of life through comparative analysis of genome sequences. These contributions have had profound impact across biological research, providing essential tools for genome annotation and evolutionary studies.
Beyond his technical contributions, Eddy has significantly shaped the broader scientific community through his advisory roles with major foundations and agencies including the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the UK's Wellcome Trust. His laboratory continues to push the boundaries of computational genomics with ongoing work in RNA structure and function, including exploration of the modern RNA world hypothesis which posits that many RNAs seen today are modern inventions rather than ancient relics. Eddy's recent research has expanded into investigating how relatively small genomes manage to specify biological complexity, particularly in neural circuits, demonstrating his commitment to addressing fundamental questions in biology. Recognized with prestigious honors including the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics and election as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, Eddy continues to lead innovative research at the intersection of computational methods and evolutionary biology.
