Graduate Program in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is a growing area of research interest in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. The department, an active participant in the Delaware Biotechnology Initiative, has five faculty members currently engaged in research in this area, applying their expertise in machine learning, distributed artificial intelligence, computer vision, and natural language processing to address a wide variety of biological problems.

Current projects include identifying protein homologues such as immune system enhancers and transporter proteins, building automated annotation systems, inferring genetic networks and their evolution, analyzing images of microarrays> and protein docking, and text-mining information such as protein-protein and protein-drug interactions from biomedical literature. These projects are supported by grants from NSF, NIH, USDA, and the US Army.

Current Faculty

• John Case, Professor: Functional, comparative genomics, and machine learning.
• Keith Decker, Associate Professor: Automated information gathering and integration, Data mining/extraction, gene networks and pathways.
• Chandra Kambhamettu, Associate Professor: Protein docking.
• Li Liao, Assistant Professor: Functional, comparative genomics, gene networks and pathways, and machine learning.
• M. Taufer, Assistant Professor: Protein-ligand docking, RNA secondary structure predictions.
• Vijay Shanker, Associate Professor: Data mining/extraction and machine learning.
• Cathy Wu, Edward G. Jefferson Chair of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Course Offerings

CISC 681 - Artificial Intelligence
CISC 887 Internet Information Gathering
CISC 841 Bioinformatics
CISC 889 Advanced Topics: Bioinformatics
CISC 889 Advanced Topics: Machine Learning

New courses are under development.