Lenwood S. Heath

Lenwood S. Heath is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1985), an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago (1976), and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1975). Before joining Virginia Tech in 1987, he was an Instructor of Applied Mathematics and member of the Laboratory of Computer Science at MIT. His research focuses on algorithms, theoretical computer science, computational biology, bioinformatics, computational genomics, complex networks, and computational epidemiology. He is a lifetime member of SIAM and a senior member of the IEEE. Heath is retiring in 2025 and currently does not accept new graduate students.

His work spans computational methods for analyzing genomic data, including taxonomic classification, pathogen detection, and evolutionary genomics. Notable contributions include frameworks for genome-based taxonomy (e.g., LINgroups), metagenomic pipelines for antibiotic resistance genes (ARGem), and epidemic modeling using social contact networks. His publications address challenges in plant pathology, viral evolution (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 variants), and computational tools for microbial identification.

Key research areas include alignment-free sequence analysis, genomic island detection, and phylogenetic reconstruction. He has developed tools like genomeRxiv for microbial genome databases and PEAK for gene regulatory network inference. His work emphasizes interdisciplinary applications of computational methods to biological and epidemiological problems.