Doctoral student receives Test of Time Award at RECOMB 2025
May 21, 2025
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Anton Bankevich, assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Test of Time Award at the 2025 International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) — widely regarded as the most prestigious international conference in computational biology.
Bankevich was recognized for his landmark 2013 paper, “Assembling Genomes and Mini-Metagenomes from Highly Chimeric Reads,” which introduced SPAdes, a genome assembly tool that reconstructs complete genomes from fragmented and noisy sequencing data. Selected from hundreds of submissions that RECOMB receives annually, the award honors papers that have demonstrated lasting impact and continued relevance over more than a decade.
SPAdes stands out as a rigorous algorithmic solution that proved data imperfections could be overcome with carefully designed methods. Despite intense competition in the field, the tool is still in widespread use today — forming the backbone of thousands of genomics and metagenomics projects. SPAdes not only helped establish quality control standards in genome assembly, but also laid the foundation for a family of specialized assembly tools tailored to challenges such as single-cell, plasmid, and metagenomic sequencing.
Bankevich co-authored the paper as an equally contributing lead author while serving as a research fellow at the Algorithmic Biology Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He earned both his bachelor’s degree and doctorate from St. Petersburg State University, where he was mentored by renowned computational biologist Pavel Pevzner. Bankevich later completed a five-year postdoctoral fellowship with Pevzner at the University of California San Diego before joining Penn State in 2022.
Share this story:
