Dan Hermelin is currently a senior academic staff member at the Industrial Engineering and Management Department at Ben-Gurion University, a position he has held since October 2013. His primary research focuses on designing and analyzing combinational algorithms for computational problems that have real-world applications, as in computational biology. This includes designing fixed-parameter and approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, and faster algorithms for polynomial-time solvable problems. He is also interested in general computer science theory, particularly complexity theory, and in specific areas of combinatorics and discrete mathematics, such as graph theory and discrete geometry, which have applications in computer science..

Dan received his PhD from Haifa University; his thesis “Algorithmic Challenges in RNA Comparative Analysis” was written under the supervision of Prof. Gad M. Landau. During his research Dan worked in the area of approximation and exact algorithms for combinatorial problems. Dan presented six of his ten papers at top international conferences (SODA, ICALP, ESA, WG, CPM and SPIRE). He likewise showed many new results on graph theoretical algorithms and optimization. He has developed many novel techniques for studying the complexity of a variety of problems involving 2-interval patterns, multiple-interval graphs and biological RNA sequencing. In most of these cases, he tackled unanswered questions and the new algorithmic procedures that he developed are considered a significant scientific advancement.

After completing his PhD, Dan spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute for Informatics Saarbrucken, Germany.

Dan has recently been awarded a four year Career Integration Grant from the European Union as part of the Marie Curie Actions.  He is also the recipient of the Nerode Prize for outstanding papers in the area of multivariate algorithmics; the award was given by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

Dan has been widely published in a variety of scientific journals, he as also been a reviewer for journals such as Theoretical Computer Science, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Theory of Computing Systems, Journal of Discrete Algorithm and Discrete Applied Mathematics.