A fundamental goal of biology is to understand how living cells work. Recent developments in biotechnology and information processing have revolutionized this research field. Computational biology is a major component of this revolution and a fertile source of interesting problems related to algorithm design, combinatorics, statistics, combinatorial optimization, pattern recognition, data mining and computational learning theory. The speaker will provide an overview of this field, describing such areas as genomic mapping and sequencing, sequence analysis and analysis of gene expression data. He will then describe how his research in this field has called upon his background in theoretical computer science but required a shift in his approach to the design and development of algorithms.