This work is part of the CAREER project. It focuses on structure and motion computation for proteins. Robotics-inspired and evolutionary algorithms are proposed to address decoy sampling in de novo structure prediction. Robotics-inspired, tree-based algorithms are proposed to address motion computation to connect functionally-relevant conformational states in proteins.

This work has involved two graduate students, Brian Olson and Kevin Molloy, and one undergraduate student, Sameh Saleh. It has resulted in two Ph.D. theses and several peer-reviewed conference and journal publications.

Highlight of work led by K. Molloy^g, B. Olson^g and A. Shehu^* at BMC Struct Biol J 2013, IEEE/ACM Trans Comp Biol and Bioinf (TCBB) 2013, IEEE BIBM-W Comput Struct Biol Workshop (CSBW) 2012, ACM Conf on Bioinf and Comp Biol (BCB) 2012, J Bioinf and Comp Biol 2012, IEEE BIBM-W Comp Struct Biol Workshop (CSBW) 2011, J Bioinf and Comp Biol 2011, Intl. Conference on Bio-inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (Bionetics) 2010, Intl J Robot Res 2010, Robot Sci and Sys Conf (RSS) 2009.