Faculty

Martin Tompa is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in computational molecular biology, with emphases on biological sequence analysis, regulatory analysis, and comparative genomics. He is also the author of Winning Schnapsen, the first — and definitive — book on the winning strategy for the national card game of Austria and Hungary.

Tompa graduated from Harvard University in 1974 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1978. For the next seven years he was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Washington, where he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, the inaugural year for these awards.

From 1985 to 1989 Tompa was on the staff of the IBM Research Division at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and became manager of its Theory of Computation group. In 1989, he rejoined the Computer Science faculty at UW, and in 1998 and 1999 he received the first two annual ACM Undergraduate Teaching Awards. In 2001 he became Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences, and from 2009 to 2013 he was Director of the UW’s interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Computational Molecular Biology.

In 2013 Tompa received the Test of Time Award from RECOMB (Research in Computational Molecular Biology) for the 2001 publication Finding Motifs Using Random Projections with Jeremy Buhler. He retired in 2020.