Mark Yandell, PhD has led software development groups in both industry and academia. As a postdoc at the Human Genome Project at Washington University, St. Louis, he was a co-developer of the PolyBayes package, the first probabilistic algorithm for sequence variant discovery. Thereafter, he joined Celera Genomics, where he directed the group that wrote much of the software used to annotate and analyze the Drosophila, Human, Mouse, and mosquito genomes. From 2001-2005 he was a senior scientist for Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), where he led the comparative genomics group at the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project. Since 2005, he has been a faculty member in the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Utah. Dr. Yandell is an internationally recognized expert in software for comparative and functional genomics. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of numerous genome projects. He is Director of the Eccles Institute’s Bioinformatics program, and frequent guest lecturer in several CSHL courses on genomics, programming and sequence analysis. He is also co-author of the O’Reilly Book on BLAST. Current projects in his laboratory include an NSF program grant for annotation of plant genomes; NIGMS support for genomics-based venom studies using the cone snail Conus bullatus; and support from the NHGRI and NIGMS for VAAST, a probabilistic disease gene finder for personal genome sequences. Dr. Yandell is technical director of the Utah Genome Project (UGP), an intramural, multi-million dollar effort to improve patient care and facilitate research on undiagnosed diseases, Co-director of the Utah Center for Genetic Discovery, Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics, a member of the Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program, and H.A. and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah.