Rodrigo Fonseca recently received a $15,000 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award from Brown University and a $148,000 Collaborative Research Award from the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC).

Rodrigo's project funded by the Salomon Award is in on the subject of “Energy Efficiency Exploration in Sensory Network Protocols.” Wireless sensor networks are a class of small, battery-powered computers embedded in the environment and useful in many settings, including industrial, health, urban, and environmental monitoring, home and building automation, agriculture, and disaster warning. The most critical resource when designing and deploying wireless sensor networks is ...

“Improving data quality is crucial, because if a human genome cannot be independently assembled then the sequence data cannot be sorted into the two sets of parental chromosomes, or haplotypes. This process haplotype phasing will become one of the most useful tools in genomic medicine. Establishing the complete set of genetic information that we received from each parent is crucial to understanding the links between heritability, gene function, regulatory sequences and our predisposition to disease.” J. C. Venter, “Multiple personal genomes await,” Nature, April 2010

For more than a decade, Sorin has been a research leader in the area of ...

Ben Raphael and his collaborators at Washington University in St. Louis have been awarded a five-year year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the expected amount of $2.5 million, for their project “Computational Approaches For Structural Variation Studies In Genomes.” The proposed project will develop novel computational techniques to study structural variation, an important class of differences that distinguish individual genome sequences. Structural variants include duplications, insertions, deletions, inversions, and translocations of large blocks of DNA sequence. These differences have been implicated in several human diseases including autism and cancer. New genome technologies are enabling large-scale ...

Kurt Spindler, right, and Shaopeng Zhang work with Diamon Curry, a student at Gilbert Stuart Middle School, during a lesson on programming. Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

By Richard Lewis

Bootstrap, a nonprofit educational organization, pairs Brown undergraduates with middle-school students in Brown computer classrooms. The kids show up after school to learn how to make animations, video games, and other cool stuff. What they're actually getting is substantial help with mathematics.

Madavin Vong’s eyes lit up as the blue rocket spewed a puff of cartoonish smoke and lifted off on her computer screen.

“Yeah!” she exclaimed. “We ...