The Department is pleased to announce that Professor Bruce Donald has been named an IEEE Fellow, effective January 2011. The distinction, bestowed by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, is awarded to Donald for his outstanding contributions in robotics, microelectromechanical systems, and computational molecular biology. The prestigious award is given to less than one-tenth of one percent of all voting IEEE members each year. "It was an unexpected and delightful honor," says Donald.
Donald has been a member of the IEEE for over 20 years since joining as a graduate student at MIT. After completing his PhD, Donald taught at Cornell University and Dartmouth College before settling at Duke in 2006. Today Donald is the William and Sue Gross Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Biochemistry at the Duke University Medical Center. His laboratory focuses on computational approaches to structural molecular biology, including projects to determine the 3D structures of biomedically and pharmacologically important proteins and to design new drugs to neutralize antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Donald has previously been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on algorithms for structural proteomics.
With this recognition, Donald joins Duke CS Professor John Reif, who is also an ACM fellow and an IEEE fellow. "John has always been a mentor and role model to me, so it's nice to follow in his footsteps," says Donald. The new Dean of Natural Sciences at Duke, Professor of CS and Mathematics Robert Calderbank, is also an IEEE fellow.
Department of Computer Science
