2011 Derick Wood graduate scholar chosen

The 2011 Derick Wood Graduate Scholarship has been awarded to Jakub Truszkowski, a student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science since 2008. Jakub designs fast algorithms for building evolutionary trees from DNA sequences. This problem is one of the oldest computational biology problems, as evolution is the core of modern biology. The two methods that Jakub has developed with his advisor, Professor Dan Brown, focus on speed and on algorithmic simplicity. They are designed to build trees from input data sets with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of input sequences, and are much faster than competing approaches, while still giving nearly comparable results. The Scholarship honours Professor Derick Wood, who taught at Waterloo from 1982 to 1992, and wrote two textbooks, "Theory of Computation" and "Data Structures, Algorithms, and Performance."