David Sankoff holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. His main research interest is comparative genomics, particularly probability models, statistics and algorithms for genome rearrangements.
Dr. Sankoff is a long-time member of the Centre de recherches mathématiques and former professor at the Université de Montréal. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the International Society for Computational Biology and is active in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is a medalist of the Association francophone pour le savoir, recipient of the first Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award by the International Society for Computational Biology and the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal from Oxford University. He is also a recipient of the Award for Exellence in Research from University of Ottawa. In 2013 the conference MAGE (Models and Algorithms for Genome Evolution) honoured Dr. Sankoff's 50th anniversary of research contribution. Dr. Sankoff was founding editor of Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. In 2014 he received a honorary Doctoral degree from Tel Aviv University for contribution to computational biology.
Media
My Voyage into Mathematical Genomics
Gazette article in connection with U of Ottawa Excellence in Research Award