Jeffress Trust Awards Program in Interdisciplinary Research has just funded our "Probabilistic Search Algorithms: Powerful Novel Tools for Peptide Modeling" proposal with Amarda as PI and Estela Blaisten-Barojas as co-PI.

Virginia Youth Tobacco Program (VYTP) has just funded our "Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Menthol Cigarette Addiction" proposal with Nadine Kabbani as PI and Amarda as co-PI.

Congratulations to Sameh. He has been selected a finalist of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (Male) 2013. Announcement of the awards will be posted on CRA's website (www.cra.org). In addition, the June 2013 issue of Computing Research News will include an article on the awards.

Congratulations to Rudy. He is a guest researcher this summer in the Cancer and Inflammation, Basic Science, Program at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

Congratulations to Brian. He just passed his Ph.D. pre-defense today. He is almost out of the door...

The Mason Students as ScholarsQEP Leadership Council has selected Amarda for the 2013 OSCAR Mentor Excellence Award. Given Sameh's award, the news is double sweet.

Wonderful news! Our very own Sameh has been selected by The Students as Scholars Leadership Council as a recipient of the 1st annual OSCAR Student Excellence Award for 2013! This is a great recognition of Sameh's research in our lab.

Congratulations to Jennifer. After struggling with many offers and options for this summer, she has decided to attend the Princeton MOL/QCB Summer Undergraduate Research Program.

Congratulations to Brian. He has just been awarded the 2013 Oustanding Graduate Student Award from the Volgenau School of Engineering. Brian will be presented with the award at the annual gala on Saturday, May 4th.

Congratulations to Jennifer. She just got admitted to the CRA-W DREU program. She will be paired with an exciting research lab in US to conduct summer research.

For those of you that understand Albanian, http://www.mapo.al/2013/01/30/pedagoget-shqiptare-ne-universitetet-e-botes/ The article features several Albanian faculty and their life journeys.

Amarda is giving a seminar at Johns Hopkin's Mechanical Engineering Thursday Seminar Series on February 14.

Congratulations to Jennifer! She has been selected to attend the TAPIA conference on celebration of diversity in computing.

Congratulations to Sameh. His abstract "An Evolutionary-inspired Probabilistic Search Algorithm to Structurally Characterize the Native State of a Novel Protein Sequence " has been accepted for presentation at the National Council of Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

Congratulations to Daniel. His paper, "Physicochemical Determinants of Antimicrobial Activity," has been accepted at BICOB 2013.

Congratulations to Jennifer. She just won a fellowship from the OSCAR Undergraduate Research Scholars Program for Spring 2013. Jennifer will continue to be a great addition to the lab.

Amarda presented "Genetic Programming Based Feature Generation for Automated Functional Analysis and Annotation of DNA Sequences" at the Rocky Mountain 2012 Bioinformatics conference in Snowmass Colorado. It was very very cold...

Together with Juan Cortes and Jianlin Cheng, we are organizing the "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Methods in Computational Biology" workshop at AAAI 2013, July, Bellevue, WA.

Congratulations to Irina for passing her MS thesis defense.

Thanks to Brian, the BCB page has been launched. Check it out at http://cs.gmu.edu/~bcb/.