Bar-Joseph Appointed to Endowed Chair
At a ceremony this week, Professor Ziv Bar-Joseph was appointed FORE Systems Professor of Computational Biology and Machine Learning. Professor Bar-Joseph is a world leader in computational methods for understanding dynamic biological systems, a critical area of research given that our cells and bodies are continuously changing. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 2003 and played an important role in the development of the Joint Carnegie Mellon University-University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, which he currently directs (with James Faeder from the University of Pittsburgh). He is well known for developing and applying rigorous computational and machine learning methods to biomedical problems. His group has published extensively both in high impact journals and highly competitive conferences. Their paper on sampling strategies for high throughput time series was chosen as the best paper at RECOMB 2016; RECOMB is one of the two top computational biology conferences. In 2012, he was awarded the Overton Prize, a prize that recognizes top junior computational biologists, by the International Society for Computational Biology. He is also principal investigator (with Gregory Cooper at the University of Pittsburgh) of Big Data for Better Health, a large, multi-investigator project funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
FORE Systems was a computer network equipment company founded by four former Carnegie Mellon professors. The founders established the FORE Systems Chair in 1995; that chair was converted to two chairs this year.