Dr. Arthur Delcher - National Science Foundation

Dr. Delcher's research currently was funded by an NSF grant entitled "Interpolated Markov Models for DNA Sequence Analysis". The 3-year, $150,000 grant was a collaboration with with a parallel-funded effort by Dr. Steven Salzberg at the The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD.

The goal of the project was to develop new, improved computer algorithms for the analysis of DNA and protein sequence data. Thus far the project has produced a new version of a microbial gene-finding system, called Glimmer, a new version of a suite of sequence comparison programs, called MUMmer, and a new program to develop probe sequences, called PROBEmer.

Several Loyola undergraduate CS majors have been involved in the project. Doug Harmon ('99) wrote most of the interpolated context model code in Glimmer. Adam Phillippy ('02) reworked much of the MUMmer code and used it to compare the genomes of two strains of Plasmodia at TIGR this past summer. Scott Emrich ('02) added a ribosome-binding-site module to Glimmer, and developed the PROBEmer system.

Dr. Roger Eastman - NASA Ames

Dr. Eastman's research is currently being funded through NASA Goddard for research on "Application of gradient-descent image registration to satellite imagery" awarded originally in fall 2000. Total amount for this current year was $25,000

The grant is part of a three-year, $600,000 grant from NASA Ames to develop software for registering two satellite images The research is intended to design, implement and test software for registration, with an implementation in part on the NASA Beowulf parallel processing system.

In the summer of 2001 two undergraduates, Jamie Smith ('03) and Rachel Knickermeyer ('03), worked on designing and implementing in Java the first version of an image registration package. They focused on the nature and design of an object-oriented user interface for the package. Their first draft was part of a presentation at the international Fusion 2001 conference in August, 2001. Also over the summer, a graduate student, Adam Henschel ('01), worked on establishing the local parallel processing simulation environment with the MPI interface under Debian Linux.