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Sushmita Roy Receives Computing Innovation Fellowship

August 15, 2009

PhD student Sushmita Roy received a Computing Innovation Fellowship for her proposal to develop 'A machine learning framework for learning networks across multiple species'. The fellowship was awarded by The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA) with funding from the National Science Foundation. The fellowship grants her a year's funding for doing post-doctoral research at the labs of Dr. Aviv Regev and Dr. Manolis Kellis at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Roy was among the 60 grantees who received this fellowship from more than 500 applicants. Roy's research focuses on machine learning approaches to solve problems in computational biology. For her PhD dissertation she is developing statistical approaches for learning condition-specific networks, which are gene networks describing how living cells behave in different environmental conditions. Her advisers, Dr. Terran Lane (Computer Science) and Dr. Margaret Werner-Washburne (Biology) are guiding her efforts in making algorithmic advances for understanding environmental condition-specific response in simple biological systems such as yeast. In the future she would like to extend her approach to understand various disease conditions, which has implications in human health.

Congratulations Sushmita!