Congratulations to third year computer science student Aaron Lindsey on receiving Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (Male) 2014!
Aaron is recognized for his research team's project, "Improving Decoy Sets for Protein Folding Simulations." His faculty mentor for this project is Dr. Nancy M. Amato, interim head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and co-director of Parasol Lab. His project collaborators are Dr. Shawna Thomas, postdoctoral research associate, Cindy (Hsin-Yi) Yeh and Chih-Peng Wu, his graduate student mentors.
Aaron and his project members from Parasol's Algorithms & Applications Group evaluated the quality of decoy protein structures as they affect protein folding simulations.
"A decoy is a computer-generated protein structure that is similar to the native state of a protein but is not biologically real," said Aaron. "These structures are used to test the ability of a protein folding algorithm to choose the protein's native state among incorrect protein conformations.
"Better decoy sets allow scientists and engineers to create more accurate protein folding simulations, leading to new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Mad Cow disease, which are commonly associated with protein mis-folding.
"We present a method to evaluate and improve the quality of decoy databases by adding novel structures and/or removing redundant structures. We test our approach on 14 different decoy databases of varying size and type and show significant improvement across a variety of metrics."
Aaron's research interests are focused on computational biology and specifically algorithms for protein folding simulations. He has authored a paper in motion planning and has a computational biology paper pending publication. This past summer he continued research into decoy sets as a participant in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program sponsored by the CSE department.
Among his honors and awards are scholarships from Aggieland Bound and the CSE Industrial Affiliates Program. Aaron was awarded membership in the Phi Eta Sigma Honor Society for earning a GPA of at least 3.5 during his first year of college, and he is the Technology Chair for Texas A&M's Honors Student Council. Aaron plans to graduate with a B.S. in Computer Science in December 2014.
CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show exceptional research potential in an area of computing research. For more information about this award, visit http://www.cra.org/awards/undergrad.