Donald Lab at Duke University
Jeff Martin
My research interest lies in developing algorithms to solve problems in computational biology. Many current approaches rely on stochastic algorithms and sampling, but these techniques make few (if any) guarantees about the accuracy of the computed solution. My goal is to design algorithms that can guarantee the the computed solution contains the correct answer by selectively pruning away answers that are provably incorrect.
Currently, I am analyzing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data to determine the structure of homooligomeric proteins. By exploiting symmetry in the protein (specifically, dihedral symmetry), we can narrow down the space of solutions in which the correct answer resides and avoid an infeasible computational search.