As Robert Robbins* put it, the DNA sequence of an organism is “the result of literally millions of maintenance revisions performed by the worst possible set of kludge–using, spaghetti–coding, opportunistic hackers (i.e. evolution) who delight in clever tricks like writing self–modifying code and relying upon undocumented system quirks”. As a result, deciphering molecular biology is the ultimate dream of a computer scientist.

Robbins, R. J., 1992. Challenges in the human genome project. IEEE Engineering in Biology and Medicine, (March 1992):25–34.

My lab focuses on genomics research, with a particular emphasis on soft-computing approaches to the understanding of gene regulation and expression. The main underlying goal is to create tools that are able to integrate diverse sets of available genomic data (i.e. genome sequences, microarray and ChIP-chip assays, etc.) in order to create more comprehensive models of gene regulation and expression.

If you are a Bioinformatics major with solid computational skills or a Computer Sciences / Math major interested in transitioning to a PhD in Computational Biology, send your CV to erill[at]umbc.edu.

See Open positions for additional details.

© Ivan Erill - 2011

UMBC - Department of Biological Sciences