Mihai Pop

Dr. Mihai Pop is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science, UMIACS, and the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB). His research focuses on computational biology, metagenomics, and algorithm development for genomic data analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University (2000), followed by work at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) developing genome assembly algorithms.

Education: Ph.D., Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2000.

Research Interests: Bioinformatics, genomics, metagenomics, computational geometry, software testing. His lab develops tools for analyzing microbial communities and has pioneered methods for metagenomic assembly and analysis. Notable tools include the AMOS genome assembly toolkit.

Recent Article Trends: Recent work emphasizes long-read sequencing, metagenomic profiling (e.g., TIPP3), and strain-level analysis (e.g., Strainy). He addresses challenges in scaling sequence-based searches and improving taxonomic resolution in large datasets.

Awards: ACM Fellow (2019), ISCB Fellow (2022), UMD Excellence in Teaching Award (2015).

Grants & Leadership: Co-leader of the Human Microbiome Project data analysis group. Active in diversity initiatives to promote inclusivity in computational fields.

Labs/Teams: Pop Lab (pop-lab.org) focuses on computational methods for microbial genomics and metagenomics.