(Original story posted on Insights Weekly).

Two Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) professors Alan Sherman and Rick Forno received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this month. The grant is $2.5 million in total, and is a part of the Federal Cyber Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, whose aim “to increase and strengthen the cadre of federal information assurance professionals that protect the government’s critical information infrastructure,” according to the SFS website.

The grant will give students at UMBC from the undergraduate to the professional studies programs a full scholarship plus an annual stipend of $8,000 for undergraduate and $12,000 for graduate students. In an article on the grant published on CSEE’s departmental page, Forno spoke of the benefits the honor will pay for the university, saying, “UMBC’s strength in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, and related STEM fields, combined with our reputation for producing qualified technologitsts makes our participation in SFS very attractive both to the school and our current and future students.”

Research Proactive

A Computational Biologist and Dartmouth professor, Alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan says his undergraduate research at UMBC was crucial to his success.

Kids typically see college as a chance to get away from their parents. That wasn’t the case with alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan (B.S. CS, BioChem ’02), who did research with his dad in UMBC’s Computational Photonics Lab as an undergraduate. In 2000, the pair co-authored a paper proposing a new visualization technique for wave transmissions that uses color to represent amplitude and phase information.

Now an assistant professor of Computer Science and an adjunct assistant professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, Grigoryan stresses the importance of doing research early on. As an undergraduate, he worked in not one, but three, different research labs at UMBC: the Computational Photonics Lab, the VANGOGH Lab, and Dr. Daniel Fabris’ Mass Spectrometry lab.  

“It was very easy for an undergrad to get involved in research [at UMBC],” says Grigoryan. “It’s not like that everywhere.”

Working in labs gave Grigoryan essential experience that shaped his career path. When it was time to pick a major, he knew that he wanted to do research like his dad, Vladimir Grigoryan, a Physicist who was working as a Research Scientist at UMBC at the time.

Grigoryan switched from Physics to an ambitious double major in Computer Science and Biochemistry when a professor told him about the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Computational Biology. Combining the principles of biology with computing techniques, the new field dealt with simulating and studying biological systems on the computer.

After graduating from UMBC in 2002, Grigoryan went to MIT for his Ph.D. in Computational Biology under Dr. Amy E. Keating. Later he completed his Post Doc at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School under William DeGrado. His research has focused on examining proteins in order to 1) understand their structure, and to 2) use that understanding to design new proteins that can do things like cure disease.

The analysis and design of proteins is what’s being done in Grigoryan’s research lab at Dartmouth. Specifically, Grigoryan and his students are looking at how protein structure dictates protein-protein recognition and the structural mechanisms of information transformation by allostery. In an interesting twist, Grigoryan now has undergraduate research assistants of his own.

As for collaborations with his dad, Grigoryan says that these days, formal collaborations are hard because of distance; Grigoryan works on molding minds in New Hampshire while his dad works at Ciena Corporation in Maryland. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from having heated scientific discussions over the phone, he says.    

This is a part/time project (20 hours/week, start date: ASAP, end date: May, 2013, negotiable) which will require the student to spend concentrated few hours a day at the NASA/GSFC facility at Greenbelt, MD. If the student has the ability she/he would be encouraged in the data analysis to develop statistical models relating the measurements. The student would also help out with other analysis and measurement activities that our group is doing. Please see attached an abstract describing the project, and let me know if you can help and/or need further information.

By Tanya Lewis

Web edition: October 31, 2012

In a proposed method for detecting dark matter, particles of dark matter would smack into gold, kicking off atomic nuclei that would sever strands of DNA in their paths.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Physicists racing to detect the mysterious substance known as dark matter are thinking outside the box by looking inside the cell. A new proposal for tracking dark matter particles relies on strands of DNA.

 All the ordinary stuff in the universe, from the atoms in people to the hot plasma in stars, makes up only about 5 percent of the universe’s mass and energy. Nearly one-quarter of the universe is composed of dark matter. (The rest is an even more puzzling entity known as dark energy.) Though several experiments claim to have detected dark matter, the results don’t agree and aren’t definitive.

Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, proposed October 28 at the New Horizons in Science meeting that a new kind of DNA-based detector could not only spot a leading candidate for dark matter, called WIMPs, but could also determine incoming particles’ direction of flight. The proposal also appeared online earlier this year at arXiv.org.

“It’s a very smart way to apply technology developed from biology to a fundamental particle physics problem,” says Jocelyn Monroe, a dark matter physicist at MIT and the University of London.

A halo of WIMPs, short for weakly interacting massive particles, is thought to encircle the galaxy. As the sun orbits the galaxy’s center, it should encounter a “wind” of WIMPs from the direction of the constellation Cygnus. At any point on Earth, such a wind should strengthen and weaken daily as the planet rotates.

Freese and her colleagues’ proposed detector, which would be sensitive to these fluctuations, consists of a stack of thin gold sheets with single-stranded pieces of DNA hanging from them. When a WIMP smacked into the nucleus of a gold atom, the nucleus would whiz off, cutting through the DNA at specific locations in the strands. 

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