I am interested in the interface between computer science and biological systems known as computational biology and bioinformatics. I am interested in the two sides of this interface: bringing biological oriented concepts such as neural networks and genetic algorithms into computer science and adapting computer science algorithms like pattern matching and computational geometry to address actual biological problems.
ABOUT MY WORK
1. How proteins acquire their three dimensional structure from
their primary sequence in vitro and in vivo.
2. Computational characterization of non-coding RNA molecules and their targets
3. Understanding biological robustness using systems biology analysis
4. Genetic Algorithms
5. Molecular computation
6. Medical data mining
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1. Unger, R., Harel, D., Wherland, S., and Sussman, J.L. 1989. A 3D building blocks approach to analyzing and predicting structure of proteins. Proteins, 5: 355-373.
2. Moult, J. and Unger, R. 1991. An analysis of protein folding pathways. Biochemistry, 30: 3816-3824.
3. Unger, R. and Moult, J. 1993. Genetic algorithms for protein folding simulations. J. Molec. Biol. 231: 75-81.
4. Unger, R. and Moult, J. 1993. Finding the lowest free energy conformation of a protein is a NP-Hard problem: Proof and implications. Bul. Math. Biol. 55: 1183-1198.
5. Kandel, D., Matias, Y., Unger, R.,Winkler, P. 1996. Shuffling Biological Sequences. Discrete Appl. Math. 71: 171-186.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
• Using simple models to understand protein folding
• Computational characterization of non-coding RNA molecules and their targets
• Understanding the clinical implications of individual genomes
• Medical data mining