• Overview:
  

The mutually beneficial interplay of electrical engineering and computer science and the lifesciences, ranging from basic biology to clinical medicine, is at the core of my research interests.

Experiments in biological sciences are of increasing complexity and increasingly quantitative conclusions are sought. The increasing complexity of the experiments requires increasingly sophisticated and quantitative planning of the experiments taking into account the behavior of the measurement apparatus, the goals of the experiment, and the unavoidable uncertainty in the system. The increasing desire for quantitative conclusions from complex experiments requires increasingly sophisticated analysis of the experimental results based on detailed understanding of the experimental system and measurement apparatus and providing both answers and measures of confidence in the answers. Ideas of Systems, Information and Computer Science are already playing a role, e.g., the hidden Markov models of Systems, Information and Computer Science have found a fundamental role in genomics, but more can be done. In the other direction, Systems, Information and Computer Science has always benefited by the challenge of new problems, e.g., wireless telephony and networking. Lifescience problems are ideal challenges, particularly in the area of dealing with heterogeneous data (e.g., mixtures of discrete and continuous data and data at different spatial and temporal scales) and raise issues such as: How should such data be modeled? How can optimal inference be performed using multiple models where each model refers to a different scale? How can the optimal algorithms be efficiently implemented in parallel computations?

My interest in the interplay of electrical engineering and computer science and lifesciences may seem contradictory with the large effort I've invested in helping the founding and continued functioning of Purdue's Department of Biomedical Engineering.  However, I don't believe that the success and growth of biomedical engineering has in any way diminished the importance and utility of electrical engineering and computer science (or mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc.) in the lifesciences.  There are plenty of challenges for a wide range of engineering disciplines!

Lifesciences is a huge endeavor of great breadth.  The specific areas in which I am active are listed below.

• Research Interests:
• Computational Structural Biology
• Implantable Autonomous MEMS Sensor for Ethanol
• High Performance Computing
• Multidimensional Signal Processing
• Statistical Signal Processing
• Current Graduate Students:
• Jae-Joon Han (Ph.D.)  (jhan@ecn.purdue.edu)
• Youngha Hwang (Ph.D.) (hwangyo@ecn.purdue.edu)
• Junghoon Lee (Ph.D.) (lee229@ecn.purdue.edu)
• Seunghee Lee (Ph.D.) (lee299@ecn.purdue.edu
• Cory J. Prust (Ph.D.) (cprust@ecn.purdue.edu)
• Balaji Raghaven (Ph.D.) (braghava@purdue.edu)
  
• Yili Zheng (Ph.D.) (yzheng@ecn.purdue.edu)
• Past Graduate Students:
• Chi-hsin Wu (Ph.D., MMC Network)
• Shan Lu (MSEE and Ph.D., Comsat)
• Yibin Zheng (Ph.D., University of Virginia, Department of Electrical Engineering)
• Wan-Chieh Pai (Ph.D., Sony)
• Cory J. Hoelting (MSEE)
• Yuh-Chin Chang (Ph.D.)
• Zhye Yin (Ph.D., General Electric Corporate Research and Development).  She is featured in an article on young engineers that appeared in Weekly Chosun, No. 1797, April 1, 2004, p. 25 (Original Korean, English translation).  Weekly Chosun is roughly the Korean equivalent of Time or Newsweek!
  
• Martin H. Plawecki [M.D.-Ph.D. (BME)] (kscoper@purdue.edu)
• Financial Support: Most of the work described here has been done with the generous support of the National Science Foundation or the National Insitutes of Health for which I am very grateful.  Please see my vita for details.
  
• Disclaimer regarding National Science Foundation support: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
• Publications in Chronological Order
  
• Vita