Charles "Chip" Lawrence is an American bioinformatician and mathematician, who is the pioneer in developing novel statistical approaches to biological sequence analysis.
After his PhD graduation, Lawrence became the assistant professor in Systems Engineering and Operations Research and Statistics, in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Lawrence has particular contributions in the development of sequence alignment algorithms, which is approaching the modif finding problem by integrating the Bayesian statistics and Gibbs sampling strategy.
In his seminal paper published in Science in 1993, the first application of the statistical technique Gibbs sampling to the problem of multiple sequence alignment was described and clearly illustrated.
Their work is more focused on the applications of the high-D inferences in the biological problems such as the regulatory motif finding, RNAsecondary structure prediction, and genome wide studies of epigenetics; besides, his research interests also expanded into the geoscience areas of change point estimators of paleoclimate records and probabilistic alignment of geological stratigraphic sequences.
From 1981 to 2003, he worked as the Chief in Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research, New York State Department of Health, many young bioinformaticians were trained by him, such as Stephen Bryant.