Prof. Dr. Eugene W. Myers, a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics, has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Free State of Saxony. According to the State Chancellery, this is in recognition of the 70-year-old's services to Saxony as a center of science. The BLAST program he developed with Stephen Altschul for comparing and searching gene and other letter sequences is one of the most cited works in computer science and is used worldwide on a daily basis. Other algorithms he developed enabled the early completion of the project to decode the human genome and other major gene sequencing projects, including at the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center, which he co-founded. The mathematician came to the state capital in 2012 as founding director of the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) and director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). Under his leadership, the CSBD became a world-leading research institution in just a few years and made a significant contribution to the positive development of the Free State of Saxony as a beacon. Myers is now being honored for this.

The Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) is a joint center of the Max Planck Society and TU Dresden. At TU Dresden, it is an integral part of the Faculty of Computer Science. With the establishment of the CSBD, Professor Myers has made central and significant contributions to the development of the Faculty of Computer Science, such as the appointment of Professor Ivo Sbalzarini, currently Dean of the Faculty and also Director of the CSBD, as well as the successful participation of the Faculty in the DFG Cluster of Excellence "Physics of Life". Eugene Myers has been an honorary professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden since 2014 and is involved in research and teaching. Together with Prof. Ivo Sbalzarini, he was involved from the very beginning in the founding and development of the successful international Master's degree program "Computational Modeling and Simulation" at the Faculty of Computer Science, which has since developed into another beacon for Saxony.

For Prof. Ivo F. Sbalzarini, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, Director of the CSBD and a close research colleague and friend of Gene Myers for many years, the award of the Saxon Order of Merit is a highly deserved recognition and a matter close to his heart:"Gene has uniquely shaped the interdisciplinary and collegial spirit in Dresden, created a globally outstanding research center with the CSBD and, last but not least, linked Faculty of Computer Science as a discipline as a whole and our faculty in particular with the excellent research landscape of life sciences in Dresden. Today, the connection between biomedicine and computer science is almost normal in Dresden, as the many centers that have since been established here in this field prove, but without Gene and his tireless commitment to the location, it would not exist here in this form."