William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine[3][9] at the University of Virginia.
[5] As a graduate student, he published several papers describing computer programs for analyzing biological data.
In 1983, he joined the faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
[10] Immediately after joining the faculty, he collaborated with David J. Lipman at the NIH to write the FASTP program,[7] and later FASTA.
[3] He was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2008, and an International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Fellow in 2018 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.