Professor Patcher is a computational biologist working in genomics. His career began in comparative genomics, and initially was interested in genome alignment, annotation, and the determination of conserved regions using phylogenetic methods. More recently he's become focused on functional genomics, which includes answering questions about the function and interaction of DNA, RNA and protein products. He's particularly interested in applications of high-throughput sequencing to RNA biology. Genomics requires the development of algorithms, statistical methodology and mathematical foundations, and a major part of his research is therefore on methods.