UCSD Undergraduates Participate in Collaborative Studies
Abroad on Cyberinfrastructure
By Kristen Miles and Teri Simas
San Diego, CA, June
20, 2006 -- Fourteen
undergraduate students from the
University of California, San Diego will arrive in
Asia and Australia later this month to conduct
collaborative research on a wide variety of topics
related to cyberinfrastructure. They were selected to
participate in the third of a three-year pilot program
funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and other organizations, to help prepare more U.S.
engineers and scientists to work on international
projects. As part of the Pacific Rim Undergraduate
Experiences (PRIME) program, the students will perform
research for nine weeks this summer at host institutions
in Osaka, Japan; Hsinchu and Taipei, Taiwan; Beijing,
China; and Melbourne, Australia.
The program is sponsored by the NSF's
Office of International Science and Engineering,
with additional support from its
Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure, and the
California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology Calit2 (www.calit2.net).
PRIME provides students with an opportunity to
participate in project-based international and
collaborative research experiences that will better
prepare them for future scientific endeavors,
particularly in the context of a global workforce. The
students, some from
UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, are also
expected to develop their research methods and skills,
while achieving greater understanding of the cultural
environments of their host countries.
Each undergraduate has a minimum
of two mentors: one affiliated with UCSD, and another
with the host institution. The host organizations are
all connected to the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid
Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) collaborative program (www.pragma-grid.net).
Gabriele Wienhausen, founding
provost of
Sixth College at UCSD, is one of three program
coordinators for PRIME and is the principal investigator
of the NSF award (http://prime.ucsd.edu/).
She is joined by Linda Feldman, senior analyst of UCSD's
Academic Internship Program, and Peter Arzberger,
PRAGMA's principal investigator, director of the Life
Sciences Initiative at UCSD, and director of the
National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR).
Japan
UCSD undergraduates Robert Sy, Ao Cathy Chang, Daniel Goodman and Marshall Levesque will
work in Osaka, Japan with Professor Shinji Shimojo,
Director of the
Cybermedia Center at Osaka University. Professor
Shimojo is a world-renowned scientist who is the
principal investigator on a major award to build a
Biogrid in Japan. Assisting in the collaborative
efforts from Osaka University is Dr. Susumu Date, an
assistant professor in the Graduate School of
Information Science and Technology. Robert Sy, a Visual
Arts Media with Computing major, will work with Dr. Date
and Professor Shimojo and UCSD mentor Tomas Molina,
researcher for NCMIR (The National Center for Microscopy
and Imaging Research), to develop multiple visualization
walls utilizing computer displays. Cathy Chang, a Cell
Biology and Biochemistry major, will focus her research
on Drug Database and Docking with the assistance of Dr.
Date and UCSD mentor Philip E. Bourne, Professor of
Pharmacology. Daniel Goodman, a bioengineering and
bioinformatics double major will evaluate and improve
DOCK software through actual screening analysis with the
assistance of Dr. Date and UCSD mentor Dr. Bourne.
Marshall Levesque, a Bioengineering: Biotechnology
student, will be working on DOCK as well, with the goals
of identifying new docking sites between proteins of
interest and screening against ligands to find those
that may inhibit enzymatic activity. Levesque will be
assisted in his research by Dr. Date and by UCSD mentor
Dr. Jason Haga in the UCSD Bioengineering Department.
Taiwan
Stephen Chen and Mahboubeh Hashemi will be traveling to
the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC)
in Hsinchu, Taiwan, under the guidance of its
Grid
Computing Division manager Dr. Fang-Pang Lin. Stephen
Chen, an Engineering Physics major, will work to
increase the resolution of tile display walls used to
present video streams and stream videos simultaneously
to multiple research facilities in the Pacific Rim.
Mahboubeh Hashemi, a Bioengineering major, will
collaborate with Dr. Lin and UCSD mentor Dr. Gabriel
Silva of the UCSD Bioengineering Department on research
in the computational techniques of automating
identification of cell locations via image processing
procedures.
Bryan Lin will be traveling to
National
Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering
(NCREE) in
Taipei, Taiwan.
Lin, a Structural Engineering major, will program and
link the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)
Real-time Data Viewer (RDV) to a PC for monitoring and
link the RDV to the test environment which will allow
anyone with Internet access to view test results rather
than just those in the research facility. He will be
assisted by NCREE's Director, Professor Keh-Chyuan Tsai,
and UCSD mentor Professor Chia-Ming Uang of the
Structural Engineering Department.
Australia
Four students will
perform research at the
School of Computer Science and Engineering at
Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Angelina
Altshuler, Celia Croy, Iwen Wu and Noah Ollikainen will
work under the direction of Professor David Abramson, a
well-respected researcher in software for
cyberinfrastructure and a developer of Nimrod/G in
Melbourne. Angelina Altshuler, a pre-med Biomedical
Engineering student, and Iwen Wu, a Bioengineering and
Biotechnology student, will work between Professor
Abramson and UCSD mentors Dr.Anushka Michailova and Dr.
Roy Kerckhoffs from the lab of Professor Andrew
McCulloch, chair of Bioengineering, to assist in the
development of more stable ionic-metabolic models of
rabbit and human ventricular myocytes. Celia Croy, a
General Biology major, will collaborate with Professor
Abramson and UCSD mentor Dr. Kim Baldridge of the San
Diego Supercomputer Center (also a professor at the
University of Zurich's Organic Chemistry Department) on
research on a combination of studies involving
computational analysis of biological structures using
the GAMESS/APBS/NIMROD programs. Noah Ollikainen, a
Biology major with specialization in Bioinformatics,
working with Professor Phillip Bourne, UCSD
Pharmacology, aims to build software that easily allows
AutoDock users to distribute a set of docking jobs on a
local network or grid.
China
Undergraduates Lily
Cheng, Elaine Liu and Lisa Danjing Zhao will conduct
research at the Computer Networking Information Center (CNIC),
Chinese Academy of Sciences under the mentorship of Drs.
Baoping Yan, Kai Nan, and Zhonghua Lu. Lily Cheng, a
pre-med Bioengineering and Pharmacological Chemistry
student, will be working to predict new epitopes,
fragments of a virus that are recognized by the body's
immune system and elicit an antigenic response, for the
current Avian influenza virus using a combination of
bioinformatics, molecular dynamics and docking
techniques on the supercomputers of the SCCAS, CNIC.
Cheng will be mentored by Dr. Zhonghua Lu at CNIC and
Dr. Wilfred Li of UCSD. Elaine Liu, an Aerospace
Engineering student, plans to create a software
application to visualize astronomical data from China to
San Diego using a tile display wall. Liu will be
collaborating with Dr. Nan and UCSD mentor Dr. Jurgen
Schulze of Calit2 on her research. Lisa Zhao, a pre-med
Bioengineering student, will examine the biological
structure of the H5N1 virus Hemagglutinin (HA) protein
in an effort to understand the effect of mutations on
host selectivity. In addition, she will learn how to
use the scientific data grid technology at CNIC to
manage large virtual screening experiments, under the
direction of Dr. Kai Nan of CNIC and of UCSD mentor Dr.
Wilfred Li.
PRIME students are
required to be U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and
must be enrolled as full-time students at UCSD with a
minimum GPA of 3.0 (out of 4.0). A gathering will be
held for PRIME participants to celebrate their
successes, and to engage
more
students and faculty mentors in the program for 2007.
For further information on the PRIME program, see
http://prime.ucsd.edu.
Media Contact: Teri Simas, PRAGMA Program Manager,
858-534-5034,
tgraysimas@ucsd.edu
