Warren Richard Gish is the owner of Advanced Biocomputing LLC. He joined Washington University in St. Louis as a junior faculty member in 1994, and was a Research Associate Professor of Genetics from 2002 to 2007. Education After initially studying physics, Gish obtained an A.B. degree in Biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley, and completed work for his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology at the same institution in 1988. Research Gish is primarily known for his contributions to NCBI BLAST, his creation of the BLAST Network Service and nr (non-redundant) databases, his 1996 release of the original gapped BLAST (WU-BLAST 2.0), and most recently his development and support of AB-BLAST. At Washington University in St. Louis, Gish also led the genome analysis group which annotated all finished human, mouse and rat genome data produced by the University's Genome Sequencing Center from 1995 through 2002. As a graduate student, Gish applied the Quine-McCluskey algorithm to the analysis of splice site recognition sequences. In 1985, with a view toward rapid identification of restriction enzyme recognition sites in DNA, Gish developed a DFA function library in the C language. The idea to apply a finite-state machine to this problem had been suggested by fellow graduate student and BSD UNIX developer Mike Karels. Gish's DFA implementation was that of a Mealy machine architecture, which is more compact than an equivalent Moore machine and hence faster. Construction of the DFA was O(n), where n is the sum of the lengths of the query sequences. The DFA could then be used to scan subject sequences in a single pass with no backtracking in O(m) time, where m is the total length of the subject(s). The method of DFA construction was recognized later as being a consolidation of two algorithms, Algorithms 3 and 4 described by Alfred V. Aho and Margaret J. Corasick. While working for U.C. Berkeley in December 1986, Gish sped up the FASTP program (later known as FASTA) of William R. Pearson and David J. Lipman by 2- to 3-fold without altering the results. When the performance modifications were communicated to Pearson and Lipman, Gish further suggested that a DFA (rather than a lookup table) would yield faster k-tuple identification and improve the overall speed of the program by perhaps as much as 10% in some cases; however such marginal improvement even in the best case was deemed by the authors to not be