Now as Faculty at Duke University.

It was very hard for Jane and me to leave the Boston area, but without tenure at Harvard, I needed to move on to some other job. I needed get a good academic job, on with tenure and with a rank of Full Professor.

 

In 1985, I received such an offer from Duke University's Department of Computer Science. They had already recruited some other faculty from Harvard and other excellent places and so Duke seemed on the rise. So I went, and have stayed since. Jane and I purchased a home in the Hope Valley area of Durham, NC. The home has a brick English country style look similar to our previous home in Belmont, but somewhat more spacious and with wonderful gardens.

 

At Duke University, I continue to do research on many diverse topics in theoretical computer science, including those mentioned above. But here at Duke I also began doing practical projects, including the design and construction of two massively parallel computers and their software. More recently, in the last five years, I have worked in an emerging new area known as DNA computation, where one uses DNA to store data and execute computation. I recruited a team of biochemists and chemists to work with me in this area. In current research project we synthesize DNA molecules that we design to self assemble into three-dimensional nanostructures such as patterned lattices and which also do computations.  I collaborate in this work with Ned Seeman at NYU, and Eric Winfree, at Caltech.