Informatics Lab Receives 445k NSF grant for Volumetric Alignments

The National Science Foundation has awarded $445,000 in a grant to PI Brian Chen and Co-PI Prof. Katya Scheinberg for the development of algorithms designed for the volumetric alignment of protein binding sites.  This funding will support the study of a new kind of protein structure alignment algorithm, which is based on mathematical optimization.  Dr. Chen will combine his expertise in protein structure comparison with Dr. Scheinberg's skills in mathematical optimization to create algorithms that align protein-ligand binding cavities.  The project also advances the study of mathematical optimization because it enables a unique opportunity to study the problem of optimization in the presense of a noisy objective function - protein structure similarity can be extremely noisy, especially with approximation algorithms involved.

Award citation: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1320137