Department of Computer Science, University of Northern Iowa

Bioinformatics Faculty Profiles

Aleksandar Poleksic, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His training and interests span the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics, with a strong emphasis on novel algorithm and application development. Prior to joining UNI, Dr. Poleksic was a Senior Scientist at Eidogen-Sertanty, Inc., where he helped develop Eidogen's computational drug discovery platform that integrates numerous algorithms in the area of protein structure determination and analysis. Dr. Poleksic was recently granted a United States patent for alignment algorithms and methodologies for rapid protein homology detection.

Kevin C. O'Kane, Ph.D., is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Northern Iowa. Prior to joining UNI, Dr. O'Kane served as the head of the Computer Science Department, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. From 1978 to 1986, he was the president of the Computer Science Applied Research and the director of Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. O'Kane has authored over 50 research papers in the areas of bioinformatics and information storage and retrieval and is a member of honor societies of Phi Kappa Phi, Upsilon Pi Epsilon and Sigma Xi.

Mark A. Fienup, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His training and interests include parallel programming, computer science education, and bioinformatics.

Michael Walter, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology. His training and interests range from plant virology to virus structure to bacteriophage-based antibiotics research. His graduate degrees are in plant virology and he has carried out postdoctoral research in virus structure-function (ligand binding) as well as in plant transgenic resistance to virus infection. His more recent bacteriophage research has led to two publications and one, 5-part patent application focused on the potential for bacteriophages to limit anthrax infection.

James Jurgenson, Ph.D., is Professor of Biology at the University of Northern Iowa. Dr. Jurgenson is broadly trained in molecular biological techniques and has extensive experience in the molecular mapping of fungal genomes. Current research interests are in the area of fungal pathogenicity of fusarium species on wheat and corn.

Syed Kirmani, Ph.D., is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Northern Iowa. His research publications, numbering about 60, range from probability and stochastic processes to mathematical statistics and biostatistics. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the recipient of a number of awards and honors including the Iowa State Board of Regents award for faculty excellence.

Nalin Goonesekere, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. He is interested in annotating new protein sequences by detection of remote sequence homology. Towards this end, he is developing context specific amino acid substitution matrices and structure-based gap penalty functions for use in score functions used for detecting sequence homology. He is also interested in the structural and functional annotation of new protein sequences, and experimental characterization of predicted functionality.

Russell Campbell, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics. His research interests include mathematical population and evolutionary genetics; effects of inbreeding.

FACULTY PROFILE

With distributed computing, the devil is in the details. That's because a programmer is dealing with all sorts of different hardware and networks. Meshing all of these elements presents a significant challenge that Paul Gray, associate professor of computer science, is leading the charge to solve... [more]

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