Mihai Pop

Mihai Pop is a professor of computer science and co-director of the University of Maryland Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences.  He develops computational approaches for analyzing microbial communities, particularly for characterizing their strain-level diversity. Other interests include biological databases, antibiotic resistance, and software testing. His lab has developed several widely used open-source software tools for the analysis of genomic and metagenomic data, including software for sequence alignment, genome and metagenome assembly, sequence clustering, and for assessing metagenome associations with phenotypes. Pop teaches at all academic levels and is a strong advocate for inclusion and diversity within the scientific community. He has a particular interest in developing open educational resources for computer science and bioinformatics and he seeks new ways to engage students and promote critical thinking and learning in his classes. Pop holds a B.S. (1994, Politehnica University in Bucharest, Romania), and a Ph.D in Computer Science (2000, The Johns Hopkins University), and has joined the University of Maryland in 2005.  He is an MPower Professor, University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State, and fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and of the International Society for Computational Biology.