Srinivas Aluru, Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of Computer Engineering, recently was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “for distinguished contributions to high performance computational biology, particularly for enabling large-scale genome analysis and systems biology through creation and application of novel parallel methods.”
For more than a decade, Aluru has pioneered the development of parallel computing methods to solve large-scale problems in biology. He has developed parallel methods and software that reduced large genome assembly time from months to days. His work is also on the forefront of bioinformatics research in next-generation DNA sequencing, where he is focusing on developing error correction algorithms and assembling genomes.
Additionally, Aluru and his collaborators developed the first parallel method for inferring whole-genome networks of complex organisms. He was part of the research consortium whose work to sequence the maize genome was featured in a 2009 Science journal, the flagship publication of the AAAS. Aluru was instrumental in bringing the Cystorm and CyBlue supercomputers to campus.
Aluru also is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has received many awards including an NSF CAREER Award (1997), IBM Faculty Award (2002), ISU Foundation’s Award for Mid-Career Achievement in Research (2006), Government of India’s Swarnajaynti Fellowship (2008), and best paper awards at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (2006) and International Conference on Computational Systems Bioinformatics (2005). He co-founded and is co-chair of the annual IEEE International Workshop on High-Performance Computational Biology and has edited the Handbook on Computational Molecular Biology (2006). He serves as a faculty member in the interdepartmental bioinformatics and computational biology graduate program at Iowa State, a program he chaired from 2005 to 2007. He received his master’s and PhD degree in computer science from Iowa State University in 1991 and 1994, respectively.
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Contacts:
Srinivas Aluru, Mehl Professor in Computer Engineering, 515 294-3539, aluru@iastate.edu
Dana McCullough, communications specialist, 515 294-2664, schmidtd@iastate.edu