Gary Benson

Biography

"Dr. Benson has been teaching for 20 years, the first 8 as a high school mathematics teacher and the remainder as a graduate teaching assistant, postdoc and assistant professor in computer science. My area of expertise and main interest in teaching is theoretical computer science/algorithms with applications in biology, i.e., computational biology and bioinformatics. While at Mount Sinai, Dr. Benson have developed and taught graduate level courses with a focus on biological sequence analysis. These include Computational Structural Biology and Advanced Topics in Computational Molecular Biology. Topics covered in the advanced course include: 1) sequence alignment algorithms, 2) scoring functions and substitution matrices for alignment, 3) database search algorithms (BLAST and FASTA), 4) multiple alignment, 5) hidden Markov models and their application to gene detection, and 6) algorithms for finding unknown repetitive patterns in sequences (enumeration, Monte Carlo and statistical methods). Dr. Benson is currently developing another course Pattern Detection Techniques for Biological Sequences which incorporates topics in pattern detection for sequences as well as methods for expression array analysis. Dr. Benson has served as advisor/mentor for graduate students and have hosted several undergraduate and high school students in my lab during summers at Mount Sinai. I participated in NSF Young Scholars programs as a guest lecturer and served as co-director of the Villanova Summer Research Institute in Biology, Computing and Mathematics. I am currently collaborating on the development of high school curriculum modules related to computational biology as part of the Gateway to Higher Education program in New York City. Dr. Benson support outreach efforts to attract and train minority students and underrepresented groups and have actively participated in such activities through the Mount Sinai summer fellowship program, the Mount Sinai Hospital Placement program for high school students and the New York City Alliance for Minority Participation in Science Engineering and Mathematics. "

Research Interest

algorithm development for DNA sequence analysis