Ying Xu, University of Georgia

Ying Xu is Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Professor of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, and the director of the Institute of Bioinformatics , University of Georgia (UGA). Before joining UGA in Sept 2003, he was a senior staff scientist and group leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he still holds a joint position. He also holds guest professor positions at Jilin University , Peking University , and Zhejiang University of China, National Cheng-Kung University of Taiwan, and adjunct professor positions in the Computer Science Department & Statistics Department of UGA. He received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991. His Ph.D. thesis was on development of efficient algorithms for matroid intersection problems. Between 1991 and 1993, he was a visiting assistant professor at Colorado School of Mines. He started his bioinformatics career in 1993 when he joined Ed Uberbacher's group at ORNL to work on the GRAIL project. His current research interests include (a) computational inference and modeling of biological pathways and networks, particularly for microbial organisms, (b) comparative genome analyses, (c) protein structure prediction and modeling, and (d) cancer bioinformatics. He is interested in both bioinformatic tool development and study of biological problems using in silico approaches. He has over 100 publications, including three books ("Current Topics in Computational Molecular Biology", MIT Press, 2002, "Microbial Functional Genomics", John Wiley and Sons, 2004, and "Computational Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Modeling", Springer, 2006). He has also given over 100 invited/contributed talks at conferences, research organizations and universities. He enjoys teaching and interacting with students. His lab currently has a number of Ph.D. students and undergraduate student researchers (he is also interested in supervising high school students to conduct bioinformatics research). He has (co)taught a number of bioinformatics courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Over the years, he has been actively involved in cummunity services within the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. In 2005-2006, he is the Program Committee (co)Chair of the IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (CSB'06). He currently serves on the editorial boards of four international journals. He is also the (co)editor-in-chief of the "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology" book series by World Scientific Publishing. In addition, he has served on review panels/study sections for major funding agencies such as NSF, NIH and DOE.

Tentative Title: Computational prediction of membrane protein structures