Our lab is getting two NSF grants this coming Fall. Both our proposals, to CCF and SSE, were funded. Congratulations to all.

Two high-school students from Thomas Jefferson high schools will join the lab this summer. The students will work with the other graduate and undergraduate students in the lab on ongoing projects.

Congratulations to Daniel. He has won a competitive internship program at the USDA this summer.

Congratulations to Jennifer. She was a big winner last night, winning also the Outstanding Project Award at the VSE undergraduate research competition.

Wint Hnin from Cornell college will join our lab this summer. Wint will work on our peptide modeling project.

Jennifer, Ruxi, Nima, and Herath will present posters on their research at the COS Undergraduate Research Colloquium as well as the VSE Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 28. Jennifer will also present at the ACS Undergradute Student Poster session on April 11 at UVA.

Congratulations to Herath Pilapitiya. He won a Mason OSCAR summer intensive award to work on an interdisciplinary project between the Shehu and Kabbani labs.

"Computational Structural Biology Workshop" (CSBW), September 20, 2014, Newport Beach, CA (with Jing He, Nurit Haspel, and Brian Chen).

"Workshop on Robotics Methods for Biological Structures and Kinematics Modeling" at Robotics: Sience and Systems, July 12, 2014, Berkeley, CA (with Juan Cortes, Jianlin Cheng, and Lydia Tapia).

"Robot Motion Planning Methods for Modeling Structures and Motions of Biomolecules" with Nurit Haspel, ACM BCB, 2014

"Evolutionary Search Algorithms for Protein Modeling: From De-novo Structure Prediction to Comprehensive Maps of Functionally-relevant Structures of Protein Chains and Assemblies" with Kenneth De Jong, ACM GECCO, 2014

Kevin's paper at BICoB 2014 was the second out of the three nominated for the best paper award.

Congratulations to Kevin for passing his proposal defense. He is now just a few months from defending his dissertation.

Congratulations to Uday. He defended his Ph.D thesis on December 11, 2013. Here is a nice photo to remember the event.
          

Congratulations to Daniel! He is that much closer to defending his Ph.D.

Congratulations to Kevin. He passed his comprehensive exam and did an excellent job at it.

Amarda gave her tenure talk on October 17. Irina and Kevin sneakily grab a photo at the beginning:
          

ACM BCB 2013 was held in Washington, D.C. on September 22-25 (Sunday-Wednesday). Amarda was local co-chair, and the entire lab (including undergraduate students) was involved with manning the registration desk and other logistics. Amarda also organized a workshop and a tutorial on Sunday, and presented Brian's talk at the main conference on Monday. Rudy and Irina presented their papers at a workshop on Sunday, and Daniel presented his paper at the main conference on Tuesday. Rudy and Irina also had posters.

Research Opportunity for Mason Undergraduate Students for Fall 2013 – Summer 2014 through the Jeffress Interdisciplinary Science Research Award:

Two to three undergraduate students are sought for a research project on “Novel Algorithmic Tools for Peptide Modeling.” Undergraduate research will be compensated at $2,000-$2,500/semester (20 hours/week).

Brian successfully defended his Ph.D thesis today, on July 24, 2013.
Here are a few photos to remember the happy event: