Thomas Lengauer

Thomas Lengauer (born November 12, 1952) is a German computer scientist, working in the fields of computational biology, computational chemistry and combinatorial optimization.

Lengauer studied Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, earning his Diploma in 1975 and a Dr. rer. nat. (equivalent to a PhD) in 1976. His thesis studied structural aspects of concurrency. Lengauer later gained an MSc (1977) and a PhD (1979) in computer science, both from Stanford University.

After a short period working at Bell Labs and Saarland University, Lengauer became Professor of Computer Science at University of Paderborn in 1984. From 1992 to 2001 he was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn and Director of the German National Center for Information Technology. Since 2001, he has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

With his Stanford PhD advisor Robert Tarjan, he is known for the Lengauer–Tarjan algorithm in graph theory.

Since the early 1990s his research has been focused in computational biology, particularly the prediction of protein structure and function, and computational drug screening and design.

In 2003, Lengauer was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal, the highest award of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Informatics Society).

Since 2014, Lengauer has been Vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He was elected as a Fellow of the ISCB in 2015. In September 2016 it was announced that Lengauer will become the next President of the ISCB, serving for three years from January 2018. He will be President-Elect through 2017.

Lengauer's twin brother Christian Lengauer was a Professor in the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Passau.