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Rensselaer Professor Petros Drineas Receives NSF Career Award
Petros Drineas, assistant professor of computer science at
Rensselaer, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development
Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Drineas will use the projected five-year, $400,000 grant to
investigate novel computational algorithms for analyzing
complex datasets with applications in health and medicine,
computer science, and social sciences.
Drineas is collaborating with researchers working on
problems in genetics, cancer diagnostics, and Internet search
engines to develop dataset analysis tools that will be useful
for specific problems. For example, he is collaborating with
genetics researchers at Yale University School of Medicine to
develop computer programs that analyze genetic data from
samples of human populations around the world. Drineas also is
working with biomedical engineers at University of Texas at
Austin to interpret gene expression data in an effort to
identify which pathways are active during different phases of
the cell cycle.
Drineas’ research focuses on how datasets change over time.
He is exploring data randomization techniques that accelerate
the computational process by reducing sampling size and still
maintaining the quality of results.
“Professor Drineas recognizes that advances in scientific
applications are dependent on the development of computational
tools that address the specific needs of fields such as
genetics,” said Omkaram “Om” Nalamasu, vice president for
research at Rensselaer.
The CAREER Award is given to faculty members at the beginning
of their careers and is one of NSF’s most competitive and
prestigious awards, placing emphasis on high-quality research
and novel education initiatives.
Drineas is currently co-organizing the “Workshop on Algorithms
for Modern Massive Data Sets,” to be held at Stanford
University in June 2006 and sponsored by NSF, the Stanford
University Computer Forum, and Yahoo! Research. He has recently
served as visiting assistant professor at Sandia National
Laboratories and visiting researcher at Yahoo! Research. He
earned a master’s and doctorate in computer science from Yale
University and a bachelor’s and master’s in computer
engineering from University of Patras in Greece. He joined the
Rensselaer faculty in 2003.
Published
March 27,
2006
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