Myers' 1990 paper (with
Stephen Altschul and others) describing BLAST has received over 62,000+ citations making it amongst the most highly cited papers ever. Along with
Udi Manber, Myers invented the
suffix array data structure. Myers was a member of the faculty of the
University of Arizona, the Vice President of Informatics Research at
Celera Genomics, and a member of the faculty at
University of California, Berkeley. At Celera Genomics, Myers was involved in the
sequencing of the
human genome, as well as the
genomes of
Drosophila and mouse. In particular, Myers advocated the use of the
whole genome shotgun sequencing technique. Later, he became group leader at the
Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2012, Myers moved to
Dresden to become one of the directors of the
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He leads a center for
systems biology. Myers' current research interests include computational reconstructions of neuroanatomical data, algorithms for analysis of functional neuroscience data, and genome assembly. Among his latest contributions is FASTK, a highly optimized kmer counter for high-fidelity shotgun read datasets. Myers was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004, together with
Martin Vingron, Myers was awarded the
Max Planck Research Prize for international cooperation in bioinformatics. He was awarded the
ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for outstanding contribution to bioinformatics, in particular his work on sequence comparison algorithms. ==Awards and honours==