Lior Pachter is a computational biologist working in genomics. His career began in comparative genomics, and initially he was interested in genome alignment, annotation and the determination of conserved regions using phylogenetic methods. He contributed to the mouse, rat, chicken and fly genome sequencing consortia, and the ENCODE project. More recently he has become focused on functional genomics, which includes answering questions about the function and interaction of DNA, RNA and protein products. Pachter is particularly interested in applications of high-throughput sequencing to RNA biology. He is also interested in algorithms, statistical methodology and mathematical foundations for computational genomics. These interests are reflected in his appointments across different departments and colleges: Mathematics, Molecular & Cell Biology and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. His group includes students and postdocs from Computer Science, Mathematics, Bioengineering, Molecular & Cell Biology and Statistics. Pachter obtained his PhD in Mathematics from MIT in 1999.