News (since July 2008)
RNA Informatics Lab alumna Dr. Chunmei Liu Won the NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award. (Additional note: Chunmei joined Howard University in 2006 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010.)
August 30
31
Where have all our recent graduates gone?
Yingfeng Wang has joined as a Postdoctoral Research Associate
in the
Computer Science and Mathematics Division
of
Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Pooya Shareghi is now a software engineer with turn.com in California, and Mika Takata is a research staff with the Hitachi Ltd. in Japan.
Congratulations!!!
May 4
31
Abdul has a new born baby boy. Congratulations!
Beautiful baby. Both the mother and the baby are doing just fine. Congratulations!!
April 24
31
Mika, Pooya, and Yingfeng have passed their defenses, Congratulations!
Mika Takata MS (Bioinformatics) thesis is "Analyese for Protein Structure Prediction", Pooya Shareghi's Ph.D (CS) dissertation has the title
"Graph Generating Systems for
Predicting Biological Structures" and Yingfeng Wang's Ph.D (CS) dissertation is "Separating Structural Non-coding RNAs
From Genomic Backgrounds". Their degrees will be conferred on May 11 at Stegeman Coliseum.
Congratulations!!
October
31
Anuj passed his dissertation defense. Congratulations!
Anuj Srivastava successfully defended Ph.D his dissertation "Evolution and detection of non-coding RNA, and
transcriptome analyses of two non-coding systems",
under the direction of Russell Malmberg. He joined UGA bioinformatics
in 2007 and will join The Jackson Laboratory, a leading genetics research
lab in Maine after Christmas, as a research scientist. Congratulations!!
August
20
Liang Ding joins the group
Mr. Liang Ding joins RNA Informatics Lab. He graduated from Univ of Texas, Pan American with an MS in computer
science. His research interests include bioinformatics, design and analysis of algorithms, and computational
complexity.
August
9
Alumnus Tim Shaw receives ARCS Foundation Global Impact Award
RNA Informatics Lab alumnus Tim Shaw receives ARCS Foundation Global Impact Award
(2011-2012).
Selected by the BHSI at UGA, Tim's application for this
fellowship was partly based on his previous work in
non-coding RNA research with RNA Informatics Lab. Congratulations!
May
20
Zhibin received his Ph.D. Congratulations!
Zhibin got it, a Ph.D in computer science. His is leaving our lab and joining a software company in Atlanta.
Well done, Zhibin!
May
4
Yingfeng awarded Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award.
Yingfeng Wang has been awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award by the UGA
graduate school with a full-year fellowship beginning the fall 2011.
Congratulations!
April
7
Anuj awarded Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award.
Anuj Srivastava has been awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award by the UGA
graduate school with a full-year fellowship beginning the fall 2011.
Congratulations!
Feb
16
Yingfeng awarded an NSF travel fund by ICCABS
Yingfeng and Pooya traveled to Orlando, FL to attend the ICCABS 2011
conference; Yingfeng presented at the podium the paper which they co-authored with Amir, Pooya, Tim,
Ying-Wai, Russell, and Liming: "Stable stems
enabled Shannon entropies distinguish ncRNA from random background".
Yingfeng was also awarded an NSF travel fund by the
conference. Congratulations! Click to enlarge pictures -- it is not difficult to
find Yingfeng from the crowd!
August
20
Tim and Zhibin presented papers at CSB2010
Tim and Zhibin traveled to Stanford University to present their papers
at the podium at the CSB2010 Conference, Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA).
August 16-18, 2010. (click to enlarge the pictures)
August
20
Russell visited Chinese Universities
Russell visited and gave colloquia at Beijing University and Jinlin University in China in Mid August, 2010.
(click to enlarge the pictures)
July
19
Angelina Jianing Wang was born July 19. Congratulations!
Yingfeng's baby Angelina Jianing Wang was born in the morning of July 19. Both the mother and the baby have been doing
well.
Congratulations!
June
15
Juber is awarded the Amazon AWS Education research grant, Congratulations!
Juber's research project:
"DawgPack - Analyzing Multiple Human Genomes in The Cloud for Clues to Cancer"
is a collaboration with Dr. Shaying Zhao of the IOB and Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology Department. The awarded grant will allow us to use cloud
computing facilties at AWS (free for one year and possibly renewable) for this project that requires extensive computing
resources.
Congratulations!
May
5
Two papers from the group are accepted to CSB 2010 -- Congratulations!
Zhibin and Mohammad's paper "RNAv: Non-coding RNA Secondary Structure Variation Search via
Graph Homomorphism" and Tim, Amir and Yingfeng's paper "ANALYZING MODULAR RNA STRUCTURE
REVEALS LOW GLOBAL STRUCTURAL ENTROPY IN MICRORNA SEQUENCES"
are both accepted to Life Science Society Computational
Systems Bioinformatics Conference (CSB2010)
to be held in Stanford Univ in August. This is an annual conference of the society.
Congratulations!
April
26
Zhibin receives Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award - Congratulations!
Zhibin is awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Award by the UGA
graduate school with a full-year fellowship beginning the fall 2010. Congratulations!
January
20
Amanda, John, Mohammad and Qi joined the group
Mohammad Mohebbi is a Ph.D. student in computer science, with an MS degree in CS from the Sharif University of Iran and teaching experience. With a BS in forestry science from UGA, Amanda Bouffier is currently a IOB graduate student pursing her MS degree. Qi Li is an MS student in computer science, with a BS degree. John Kerry is a CS undergraduate student, with a short term goal to pursue bioinformatics/plant biology graduate program.
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
RNA Informatics Lab 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.
