A: Great ones! I'm very proud of my students. See this list of lab alumni .
A: Please do not publish my ε-maiℓ address on any website or maiℓing list or book (yes, people have actually published books that are lists of scientists' 3maiℓ addresses). It will cause me to receive spam, since the address can be harvested by advertisers.
A: I received my Ph.D. at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and I have been an AI professor ever since. We use and develop AI and Machine learning algorithms and applications. Some more details are our papers on BioArxiv, or in our recent journal/conference papers.
A: If you are a graduate student at Duke, please come by and talk with me and we can discuss your research interests.
If you are not, you should apply to one of the graduate programs at Duke. At Duke all admitted students always get full funding provided they are making adequate progress towards their degree. Unlike many other places however we have admission systems centralized by department, not by professor. No individual professor has any input or control over who is admitted to any department. You must go through the admission process if you wish to be admitted. I take students through my several departments, including:
Please also see this page for more details on applying to Duke.
Many of my students and postdocs have their own funding. You should definitely apply for these grants and fellowships; see this list of opportunities.
A: Any of them would work, but the usual choices are the Ph.D. program in the Department of Computer Science or the Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology (CBB). My computational students usually do theory, implementation, and computational (in silico) experiments. Computer science (CS) Ph.D. students are more likely to be dyed-in-the-wool technologists. Computational Biology (CBB) Ph.D. students are usually sure they want to work on biological problems.
A: Yes, please apply. I have both a computational group and an experimental group. I have had experimental students in all four programs.
Q: How many students in each of the programs are experimentalists?
A: Most of the experimental students are in Biochemistry, Chemistry, BME. Some are in CBB. A few are in CS.
Of course, my computational and experimental students collaborate closely, and some students do both.
A: By "experimental" I mean wet-bench (in vitro or in vivo) experiments. In contrast, my computational students usually do theory, implementation, and computational (in silico) experiments.
A: Sorry, no. Our labs are set up to serve Duke students getting their degrees here. If you want to be part of Duke please apply to be a student here. See above.
A: If you are a graduate student at Duke, please come by and talk with me and we can discuss your research interests.
If you are not, you should apply to one of the graduate programs at Duke (please see above). Many prospective students seem to send resume-style information in hopes that my research group has "openings" to fill in the sense of a typical job. This might be true for some research groups; however, I do not usually operate this way. I look for top students who I think will be successful, and do my best to bring them to Duke. Often, it is most appropriate for students to first spend some time at Duke taking courses and/or working on rotation projects with me before officially joining my group (meaning that I become a thesis advisor). After a semester or two, they can refine their interests and determine whether my research area would be most exciting to them. This gives us the opportunity to determine whether we are a suitable match in terms of technical background, motivation, personality, etc.
A: Maybe. I usually want to find out: Did you train in a great lab? Do I know your adviser and mentors? Do you want to work on projects of central interest to my lab? Postdocs are funded either from my grants, or apply for their own funding (e.g., NRSA etc).
If I'm looking for a postdoc for a particular project or with particular skills I will post that here.
I have never hired or admitted a person whom I didn't know personally or who didn't come with very strong recommendations from leading researchers in the field.
A: We use a lot of different kinds of mathematics in our work. Here is a brief list of some of the techniques we use; Some more details are in our recent papers.
A: We use a lot of different kinds of experiments in our work. These include cloning, mutation, expression, and purification of proteins and protein complexes; stable-isotopic labeling; NMR; X-ray crystallography, Cyro-EM Microscopy, activity assays and binding assays by fluorescence, BLI and SPR; kinetics (both steady-state and pre-steady-state); stopped-flow and quenched-flow; thin-layer chromatography; and stability (CD). We have also done virus neutralization and Ussing chamber experiments with collaborators. We do lots of computational (in silico) experiments and predictions as well. Some more details are in our recent papers. We also use a variety of microfabrication techniques in MEMS and nanofabrication (see our papers, and SMIF).
Thanks for reading my FAQ. I appreciate the interaction with people all over the world, but hope that some of the most urgent questions will find an answer on this FAQ.
Acknowledgments: Rod Brooks, Karl Böhringer, Ken Goldberg, Allison Okamura, Sebastian Thrun, ...