David Sankoff (born December 31, 1942) is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journalLanguage Variation and Change (Cambridge)[6] and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals.[7][8][9][10] Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics.[3] He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming[11] for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words,[2]
"Michael Waterman and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
^:Sankoff, David (2008). "How to Predict the Evolution of a Bilingual Community". In Meyerhoff, Miriam and Naomi Nagy (eds.), Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities: Celebrating the work of Gillian Sankoff (pp. 179–194). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
^Sali, Tagliamonte (2015-11-02). Making waves : the story of variationist sociolinguistics. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom. ISBN9781118455166. OCLC921307274.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^:Sankoff, D.; S. Laberge (1978). "The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability". In D. Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods (pp. 239-250). New York: Academic Press.
^Sankoff, D; C. Morel; R. J. Cedergren (1973). "Evolution of 5S RNA and the non-randomness of base replacement". Nature New Biology. 245 (147): 232–234. doi:10.1038/newbio245232a0. PMID4201431.