Bill Sears Colloquia - Fall 2003

The Bill Sears Club is an informal series of talks intended to give CAM students an idea of the research interests of various CAM-affiliated faculty. First and second year students are especially encouraged to attend.

For Fall 2003, the talks will be held every other Wednesday from 12:30 to 1 in the conference room in 657 Rhodes (or in 655 Rhodes Hall), with pizza served beforehand. (Email Dolores Pendell, dap7@cornell.edu, by 10 am Wednesday if you want pizza.)

• September 24 - David Shalloway, Molecular Biology and Genetics - Computational biology with a focus on protein folding and biodata analysis
  
• October 8 - Rick Durrett, Math, "Genome Rearrangement"
  Abstract: Genomes change not only by small scale processes that change the DNA sequence but also by inversions of large segments or translocations between chromosomes. Computer scientists have studied these problems for almost a decade using parsimony methods - i.e., what is the minimum number of events to get from one species to another. For the last 2-3 years we have been developing stochastic methods with Rasmus Nielsen and Tom York. In the talk I will describe some of our results for the inversion distance problem. Trying to understand the failings of the parsimony method leads to an interesting math problem that involves random graphs.
• October 22 - Veit Elser, Physics
  
• November 5 - Golan Yona, Computer Science
  
• November 19 - Christine Shoemaker, Civil and Environmental Engineering