Vaughn Iverson is a UW CSE Masters alum, now a Ph.D. student working in Ginger Armbrust‘s lab in UW Oceanography. The New York Times writes:
“By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.
“The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct. ‘Nobody’s been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying,’ said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome.”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is on Vaughn’s thesis committee; UW CSE’s Bill Howe and the UW eScience Institute work extensively with Ginger’s lab.
Read the New York Times article here.