Volker Brendel joined the IU faculty in January 2012, with a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Biology and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. His research interests bridge molecular biology, statistical modeling, and bioinformatics algorithm development. His group provides web resources for comparative (plant) genomics. Recent efforts of the group have been devoted to exploring cyberinfrastructure solutions to mining massive amounts of new genomic sequence data.

Dr. Brendel has come from Iowa State University, where he was the Bergdahl Professor of Bioinformatics. He received his M.Sc. degree in Applied Statistics from the University of Oxford, UK, in 1981 and his Ph.D. in Life Sciences from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 1986. Prior to joining the Iowa State University faculty in 1998, Dr. Brendel was at Stanford University, CA, as research associate and lecturer.