Members of Bioinformatics.org have chosen Benjamin Langmead of Johns Hopkins University as the laureate of the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences. The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by this organization to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life science.

IDIES affiliate Ben Langmead is, in the words of his nominators, one of the most influential and highly cited authors of open source bioinformatics software. His Bowtie read alignment tool and its sequel Bowtie 2 are widely used, with more than 10,000 citations between them, and they are used within more than 50 other software tools. Ben also has a series of publications on open source cloud-enabled tools that have collectively pushed back the frontier of what everyday biological researchers can do with large sequencing datasets. All of Ben’s software, and all the software from his lab, are free and open source. He has also made available a large collection of open teaching resources that have become very popular (www.langmead-lab.org/teaching-materials/). Ben Langmead is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.