Phillip Greene (computational scientist)

Philip Palmer Green (born July 5, 1950) is an American theoretical and computational biologist whose software for DNA base calling, sequence assembly and genetic-linkage analysis became foundational to the Human Genome Project and modern next-generation sequencing workflows.^[2][3] He is a professor of Genome Sciences and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Washington.^[4]

Green grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and matriculated at Harvard College in 1968, earning an A.B. in mathematics (magna cum laude) in 1972.^[1] He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in operator-algebra theory under Marc Rieffel but soon transitioned to computational genetics during post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology.^[1]

After a faculty appointment in mathematics at Caltech, Green moved to the University of Washington in 1987 and co-founded its Genome Center, later the Department of Genome Sciences.^[4] He has held joint appointments in Computer Science & Engineering and Bioengineering, mentoring more than 40 graduate students and post-docs.^[5]

• Phred – Green and Brent Ewing developed the first base-calling algorithm with statistically calibrated quality scores, reducing sequencing error rates by 40–50 %.^[6]
• Phrap & Cross_match – His assembly software introduced quality-weighted contig building, critical for shotgun strategies used at the Human Genome Project and Celera.^[7]
• Lander–Green algorithm – A likelihood-based method for multilocus linkage analysis that enabled dense human genetic maps.^[8]
• EST analysis – Showed that expressed-sequence tags implied ≈35,000 human genes, a benchmark pre-genome publication.^[9]
• Ancient conserved regions – Demonstrated deep evolutionary conservation in vertebrate genomes, foreshadowing comparative genomics.^[10]

• Elected member, National Academy of Sciences (2001)^[2]
• Canada Gairdner International Award (2002) for computational tools enabling genome sequencing^[11]
• Fellow, International Society for Computational Biology (2003)^[12]
• HHMI Investigator (1994 – 2016)^[13]
• Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Technology (U.S., 1997)^[14]

• Ewing B, Green P (1998) Base-calling of automated sequencer traces using Phred I. Genome Res **8**:175–185.
• Green P (1994) Phrap documentation. Available at <https://www.phrap.org/>.
• Green P, et al. (2007) Short read sequencing and assembly. Nature **444**:17–24.

Green is married to computer scientist Rhona Greaves and is an avid marathon runner.^[5]

• Official website

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