Gusfield was named distinguished professor in 2016, which is the highest campus-wide rank at the University of California at Davis.
His first result in computational biology was written in the Yale Technical Report The Steiner-Tree Problem in Phylogeny, which has never been published in a journal.
He was more recently an invited visiting scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley during two of its semester-long programs (first on Evolution, and later on Algorithmic Challenges in Genomics).
[citation needed] Gusfield has made significant contributions to molecular sequence comparison and analysis,[12] phylogenetic tree and phylogenetic network inference,[13] haplotyping in DNA sequences,[14][15][16] the multi-state perfect phylogeny problem using chordal graph theory,[17] and fast algorithms for RNA folding.
Integer Linear Programming in Computational and Systems Biology: An Entry-Level Text and Course (Cambridge University Press, 2019.
ISBN 9781108421768) explains why and how Integer Linear Programming is a valuable technique for addressing and solving computational problems in biology.
Subsequently, Gusfield and students explored the use of Satisfiability-solvers to efficiently solve biological problems where integer programming was not effective.
The premise of the book is that more modern proofs of these theorems are much simpler and easier, and when presented for non-specialists, can be understood by anyone with no more than a junior-high education and with the discipline to follow a rigorous logical argument (pen in hand).
[citation needed] Gusfield was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015[21] for contributions to combinatorial optimization and computational biology.