Michael Waterman's Contributions to Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

On the occasion of Dr. Michael Waterman's 80th birthday, we review his major contributions to the field of computational biology and bioinformatics including the famous Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence alignment, the probability and statistics theory related to sequence alignment, algorithms for sequence assembly, the Lander-Waterman model for genome physical mapping, combinatorics and predictions of ribonucleic acid structures, word counting statistics in molecular sequences, alignment-free sequence comparison, and algorithms for haplotype block partition and tagSNP selection related to the International HapMap Project. His books for graduate students and geared toward undergraduate students played key roles in computational biology and bioinformatics education. We also highlight his efforts of building the computational biology and bioinformatics community as the founding editor of the and a founding member of the International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB).