Thomas Lengauer

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Thomas Lengauer (born 12 November 1952) is a German computer scientist and computational biologist. He studied mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, earning a Diploma in 1975 and a Doctor of Natural Sciences in 1976. He then went to Stanford University, where he earned an MSc in 1977 and a PhD in 1979 in computer science. He completed his habilitation at Saarland University in 1984.

In the 1980s he did research in theoretical computer science at Stanford, Bell Labs, and Saarland University. He became a professor at the University of Paderborn in 1984. Early in his career he worked on how to design integrated circuits and solve packing problems. From 1992 to 2001 he was a professor at the University of Bonn and directed the Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing at the German National Center for Information Technology. Since 2001 he has been the director of the Department of Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

Lengauer is known for the Lengauer–Tarjan algorithm in graph theory, developed with his Stanford PhD advisor Robert Tarjan. Since the early 1990s his research has moved toward computational biology, including methods for aligning molecular sequences, predicting protein structure and function, and computational drug design. He helped found BioSolveIT, a company in Germany, with colleagues from his research team.

From 2000 onward his group has studied HIV resistance, and since 2005 he has worked in computational epigenetics. He retired as a director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in 2018 and since 2019 has been part-time affiliated with the Institute of Virology at the University of Cologne.

Lengauer has advised more than 50 PhD students and coauthored more than 350 publications. He helped start the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA, 1993) and the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB, 2002). He was a founding member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and served as its president from 2018 to 2021; he became a Fellow of the ISCB in 2015 and a Fellow of the ACM in 2021. He has held leadership roles at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, including Vice President in 2025. He is also a member of acatech and Academia Europaea. His twin brother, Christian Lengauer, was a professor at the University of Passau.