News (since July 2008)
October
15
Undergraduate students joined the group
Ben Ngyuen, a Biochemistry undergraduate student, and Sang Ngyuen, a
Computer Science undergraduate student, joined our research group to
train in and to contribute to the research.
October
12
Abdul Samad joins the group
Abdul Samad, a CS Ph.D student with the Fulbright Fellowship
has
joined the group.
Abdul is interested in graph theory and algorithms for computational
biology.
September
5
Juber Patel and Deshen Lin join the group
Juber Patel and Deshen Lin
have joined the group.
Juber is a new Ph.D student in the Institute of Bioinformatics; he has a MS in computer science.
Deshen is a second year MS student in the Department of Computer
Science, with 5 years of industry experience.
August
17
Alumna Dr. Chunmei Liu won the NSF CAREER award
RNA-Informatics Group alumna Chunmei Liu won the 2009 NSF CAREER award for her
project titled, "CAREER: A Complete System for Protein Identification with Computational
Approaches". Chunmei received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Georgia in 2006
and is currently an assistant professor at Howard University, Washington DC. The NSF CAREER
award is the most prestigious award to faculty in their early careers.
Chunmei completed her doctoral dissertation research under the supervision of Liming and Russell.
Congratulations, Chunmei!
August
14
Mika Takata joined the group
Mika is a new Ph.D student of the Institute of Bioinformatics at UGA.
She holds an MEng in Computer Science awarded by Waseda University, Japan (in 2009). Her research
interests include ab initio prediction of protein tertiary structures
and protein classification.
August
8
Liming and Russell attended Benasque RNA Workshop
Liming and Russell attended the Computational Methods for RNA Analysis Workshop, Benasque, Spain Jul 26 -- Aug 08. The RNA Workshop is dedicated to RNA informatics research, organized every three years in the same place, and by invitation only. Liming gave a talk "Homology Search for Pseudoknots and Beyond". The workshop site Benasque is a small village within the Pyrenee mountain about 5 hour bus ride from Barcelona.
May
25
Anuj and Yingfeng attended RECOMB2009
Anuj presented a poster "Phylogenetic study of Three Bacterial RNA Secondary Structures" in RECOMB 2009 (Tucson, Arizona, May 18-21).
Dong and Yong were awarded with MS. in Computer Science and graduated from UGA on May 8,
2009.
Congratulations! 
Sal LaMarca joined the group. He is a CS PhD student with experience in
machine learning and evolutionary computation. 
Amir Manzour and Tim Shaw, graduate
students of the
Bioinformatics program in the IOB have joined our group. Amir's research experience is in
information theory based study of disease association and has just
published a paper in that area. Tim has a BS in Computer Science from
GaTech and is interested in evolution and RNA folding energy functions.
Dr. Russell Malmberg
has been named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members
by their peers. Dr. Malmberg has made distinguished contributions to the
field of plant biology, and for studies of biochemical genetics,
evolution and bioinformatics. Congratulations! See 
Ying Zheng, a computer science Ph.D student at CSU is visiting the RNA-Informatics group. She will do
research with us until next November. Her research experience is in parameterized algorithms,
complexity theory, and computer networks.
New Computer Science graduate students Amy Liu and Xingran Xue have joined the RNA-Informatics group.
