Research
My research focuses in the areas of Bioinformatics and Biomolecular Computing. I am interested in applyling computational and mathematical tools and techniques to Bioinformatics, specifically in the classification and clustering of microarray data and the management of regulatory motifs. I am also working on providing a generic platform that facilitates web services of Bioinformatics tools. In Biomolecular computing, my interest centers on the codeword design problem, which aims to provide large sets of structure-free single DNA strands for large-scale biocomputing experiments.
I am currently affiliated with the W. Harry Feinstone Center for Genomic Research, the Bioinformatics Program, and the Biomolecular Computing Lab at the University of Memphis.
My research collaborators include Drs. Thomas R. Suter, Olusegun George, Max Garzon, Ramin Homayouni, Steven Skiena, Pavel Sumazin, and Maharaj Mukherjee.
My Ph.D. thesis combines combinatorial optimization and local search. In 2003, we released DISCROPT, which is a metaheuristic optimizer that can be customized to address a wide range of combinatorial problems such as permutation problems (TSP, HamPath, Bandwidth optimization)....), subset problems (SAT, Vertex Cover, MaxCut...) and partition problems (Vertex Coloring, ...)