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     COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER
AND THE SCHOOL OF PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, & COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES
                            (CSI 898-Sec 001)
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          Simplifying and Sampling the Protein Conformational Space
 
                       Amarda Shehu 
Computer Science Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
 
This talk will cover some of the recent advancements in probabilistic search of the protein 
conformational space. Techniques that simplify the effective conformational space for 
searching, such as fragment-based assembly, will be discussed. Discretizations of the 
protein conformational space through graph-like search structures will also be introduced. 
These strategies will be presented in the context of state-of-the-art probabilistic search 
algorithms, some of them proposed by the Shehu lab. Applications of interest will focus 
on computing native-like conformations of diverse proteins.
 
Bio: Amarda Shehu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science 
at George Mason University. She holds affiliated appointments in the Department of 
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Department of Bioengineering at 
George Mason University. She received her B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics 
from Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice 
University in Houston, TX, where she was an NIH fellow of the Nanobiology Training 
Program of the Gulf Coast Consortia. Shehu's research contributions are in computational 
structural biology, biophysics, and bioinformatics with a focus on issues concerning 
the relationship between sequence, structure, dynamics, and function in biological 
molecules. Shehu is the recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award for her research 
on probabilistic search algorithms for protein conformational spaces.

                       Monday, February 6, 2012
                               4:30 pm
                    Room 301, Research I, Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminar/schedule.html