Michael Waterman works in the area of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, concentrating on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping. His paper with Idury in 1995 introduced the use of Eulerian and De Bruijn graphs for sequence assembly.