About the Author

Bill Majoros is an accomplished computer scientist, musician, author, and bird watcher. Early in his career he worked on Top Secret classified projects for the United States government as a contractor at the Lockheed-Martin Corporation, followed by contributions to the human genome project at Celera Genomics that determined the very first complete genomic human DNA sequence. His seminal book on computational methods for finding genes in DNA (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is currently in use as a textbook for PhD-level courses at a number of prominent universities. His research at Duke University focuses on finding mathematical patterns in DNA, particularly in the evolution of DNA elements that regulate the expression levels of genes. This research has the potential to impact future cures for innumerable diseases.
In a more avian vein, he has applied mathematical techniques to the rigorous study of syntactic structure in bird song, with a minor publication in 2001 resulting from hundreds of hours of recording wild bird song in the field followed by sophisticated and novel computational analyses to characterize the grammatical capabilities of a particular species of songbird (the house finch, Carpodacus mexicanus).

The author and his very special dog Kelsey at Duke University (March, 2011).
(Photo by Caroline Gilmore. Used with permission.)

He took up digital bird photography in 2006, though his experience with digital image processing and graphics programming dates to the early 1980’s, and he has been an avid bird watcher since 1994. His bird photos have been featured in displays at state museums, in publications by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in wall calendars published by local nature associations, by the Sierra Club, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and on plaques at local parks. He is a strong proponent of the Open Access movement for free access to scientific information, and has published numerous research articles in open-access journals. He currently resides with his 14-year-old labrador retriever, Kelsey the Amazing Dog, in North Carolina. A sample of his photography portfolio can be viewed at ThirdBirdFromTheSun.com.