Ben Langmead, the 2016 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, is recognized across the computational and life sciences fields for his innovative methods for analyzing high-throughput biological datasets, which are helping to transform how biomedical researchers and other life scientists access and use DNA sequencing data.

An associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University and director of the Langmead Lab, Langmead studies and applies ideas from sequence alignment, text indexing, statistics, and high-performance computing to create open-source software and resources for life scientists. DNA sequencing has become a ubiquitous tool in the study of biology, genetics, and disease, and Langmead’s innovations in the field include developing high-impact software tools (e.g., Bowtie, Bowtie 2) that address common genomics research questions. His lab has created recount3, Snaptron, and other resources and tools that make it easy to query large collections of archived sequencing datasets. His group’s software tools and resources have been cited tens of thousands of times according to Google Scholar.