Abstract: RNA molecules are increasingly in the spotlight, in recognition of the important roles they are now known to play in our cells, and their promise in therapeutics. In this talk, we will give some background on these fascinating molecules, and will describe ways in which computer algorithms can help shape our understanding of their structure - particularly secondary structure - and function.

Short Bio: My research interests are in computational complexity theory and biomolecular computation. In the area of computational complexity, I am generally interested in randomized models of computation and randomized algorithms.

My work in the area of biomolecular computation focuses on design of DNA strands for molecular computations, and also on surface based DNA computations, in collaboration with the Wisconsin DNA Computing Project A goal of this research, which involves chemists, materials scientists, and computer scientists at U. Wisconsin is to store digital information in surface-bound DNA molecules in a scalable fashion and to perform logical operations on that information using enzymatic and chemical processes, thereby "computing" with DNA.

I am also interested in automatic methods for showing that cache coherence protocols implement certain memory models, such as sequential consistency.