Dennis Shasha is a professor at NYU's Courant Institute where he does
research on biological pattern discovery for microarrays, database
tuning, the database design for time series, and lately system design
for catastrophe planning.  He spends much of his time building pattern
recognition software these days.

After graduating from Yale in 1977, he worked for IBM designing
circuits and microcode for the 3090.  He completed his Ph.D. at
Harvard in 1984 (thesis advisor: Nat Goodman).  Since he enjoys
typing, he has written a few books: a professional reference book
"Database Tuning: principles, experiments, and troubleshooting
techniques" (2002, Morgan Kaufmann), three books about a mathematical
detective named Dr. Ecco entitled "The Puzzling Adventures of
Dr. Ecco" (1988, Freeman, 1998 by Dover), "Codes, Puzzles, and
Conspiracy" (1992, Freeman), "Dr. Ecco's Cyberpuzzles" (2002,
W. W. Norton), a book of biographies about great computer scientists
called "Out of Their Minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great
computer scientists" (1995, Copernicus/Springer-Verlag), and "Pattern
Discovery in Biomolecular Data: Tools, Techniques, and Applications"
published in 1999 by Oxford University Press.  In addition, he has
co-authored thirty journal papers, 40 conference papers, and six
patents.  He writes a monthly puzzle column for Scientific American.