Páll Melsted

Pall obtained a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Iceland in 2003. He recieved his PhD degree in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Melllon University in 2009, his thesis was titled "Algorithms for Random Graphs". Pall was a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Human Genetics at University of Chicago in the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Pritchard working on software and method for de novo transcriptome assembly and genome assembly. Since 2011 he has been an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Iceland.

The main research focus is on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. My current research projects include developing methods memory efficient methods for de novo transcriptome assembly and whole genome assembly for mammalian sized genomes. The advent of High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) has enabled us to obtain massive amounts of DNA and RNA data from variouse *-seq experiments. However, working with this data can be nontrivial. In organisms without a known or well annotated reference genome this is requires a considerable computational effort to construct the genome or transcriptome from stratch. One of the major bottlenecks is memory usage that is made worse from the presence of errors in the sequencing reads. Dr. Melsteds work focuses on developing algorithms and software to reduce the amount of memory needed so that smaller labs can work with novel data without access to a supercomputer. Additionally he has developed a robust assembly platform that has been used for de novo RNA-seq assembly and de novo Mitochondrial assembly.

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