Dr. Benedict Paten is an associate professor in the department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and an associate director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. He directs the Computational Genomics Lab at UCSC, which is broadly focused on computational genomics, creating algorithms, software and services addressing biomolecular challenges. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in computational biology.