Ben Langmead, the 2016 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, is recognized across the computational and life sciences fields for his innovative methods for analyzing high-throughput biological datasets, which are helping to transform how biomedical researchers and other life scientists access and use DNA sequencing data.
An associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University and director of the Langmead Lab, Langmead studies and applies ideas from sequence alignment, text indexing, statistics, and high-performance computing to create open-source software and resources for life scientists. DNA sequencing has become a ubiquitous tool in the study of biology, genetics, and disease, and Langmead’s innovations in the field include developing high-impact software tools (e.g., Bowtie, Bowtie 2) that address common genomics research questions. His lab has created recount3, Snaptron, and other resources and tools that make it easy to query large collections of archived sequencing datasets. His group’s software tools and resources have been cited tens of thousands of times according to Google Scholar.
Langmead holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He also founded and organized the Genomics@JHU seminar series, which brings both junior and senior genomics researchers to speak at Johns Hopkins.
He is a member of the ACM; the ACM Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics; the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers; the International Society of Computational Biology; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Langmead won the Genome Biology Award for outstanding paper by the U.K.’s BioMed Central. He also received both an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award in 2014. In 2018, Langmead received the Professor Joel Dean Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of Computer Science and the William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award from the Whiting School of Engineering.
He is on the editorial boards of Genome Biology and the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics and serves on the advisory board for Chile’s Centre for Biotechnology and Bioengineering. A sought-after manuscript reviewer, Langmead has also served on NSF and National Institutes of Health grant review panels, and now serves as a standing member of the Biodata Management and Analysis Study Section at the NIH. In addition to numerous conference leadership roles and presentations, he has served on program committees for Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) and the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and has chaired the program committee for the RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Massively Parallel Sequencing.
Langmead received a bachelor’s in computer science, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2003 and a master’s (2009) and a doctorate (2012) in computer science from the University of Maryland. Prior to his graduate studies, Langmead spent four years as an engineer at Reservoir Labs. He first joined Johns Hopkins in 2009 as a research associate in the Department of Biostatistics.
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Ben Langmead took home the Best Paper Award while Steven Salzberg was one of five distinguished keynote speakers at the annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology.
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Researchers release a new algorithm that promises to help restructure the human reference genome into a more powerful—and inclusive—graph-based representation.
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Bhavik Agarwal has been accepted into Google’s CS Research Mentorship Program, which supports students from historically marginalized groups in their pursuit of computing research pathways.