Sander credits his move from theoretical physics to computational biology to Fred Sanger's 1977 landmark paper in Nature,[REF] in which the nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage φX174 was published [REF].
Sander has also worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute, has served as chief information officer for the biopharmaceutical company Millennium Pharmaceuticals and has been an advisor to IBM's Deep Computing Initiative, which produced the Deep Blue chess computer [REF].