Dr. Thomas D. Schneider

Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D. is a Senior Investigator in the RNA Biology Laboratory, National Cancer Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He was on the Editorial Board of Nucleic Acids Research.
 
Tom invented the sequence logo, a widely used information-theory based graphic to display sequence alignments. He also invented the Medusa™ Sequencer, a DNA sequencing machine that is one molecule and he discovered 70% molecular efficiency, which defines the exact relationship between information and energy in biological systems.
 
His papers include Generalizing the Isothermal Efficiency by Using Gaussian Distributions, Restriction enzymes use a 24 dimensional coding space to recognize 6 base long DNA sequences, 70% efficiency of bistate molecular machines explained by information theory, high dimensional geometry and evolutionary convergence, Small membrane proteins found by comparative genomics and ribosome binding site models, Discovery of novel tumor suppressor p53 response elements using information theory, Xeroderma Pigmentosum-Variant Patients from America, Europe, and Asia, Twenty Years of Delila and Molecular Information Theory, Discovery of Fur binding site clusters in Escherichia coli by information theory models, and Use of the “Perceptron” algorithm to distinguish translational initiation sites in E. coli.
 
His patents include Method and apparatus for producing an image of a person’s face at a different age, High speed parallel molecular nucleic acid sequencing, Molecular motor, Computational analysis of nucleic acid information defines binding sites, Probe for nucleic acid sequencing and methods of use, and Molecular computing elements, gates, and flip-flops.
 
Tom earned his B.S. in biology at MIT in 1978 and earned his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Colorado, Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. His thesis was on applying Shannon’s information theory to DNA and RNA binding sites.