Stefanovic
receives NSF award
Darko Stefanovic,
assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in
the School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.
The five-year
grant is for $450,000. Stefanovics research involves recently
discovered deoxyribozyme logic gates as a new foundation of
decision-making and computational logic networks.
Stefanovic,
with Milan N. Stojanovic of the Department of Medicine, Columbia
University, established last year that molecular logic gates
can be built using deoxyribozymes, which are enzymes that catalyze
nucleic acid reactions.
Their newest
result, a first-ever game-playing molecular automaton, appears
in the current issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. The
automaton, called MAYA, implements a version of tic-tac-toe.
Stefanovic says the goal of the proposed research is to establish
the basis for modular and reliable construction of larger circuits
using deoxyribozyme logic gates that can one day be used in
medicine.
Stefanovic
and Stojanovic hope the broader impact of the work will eventually
provide models of deoxyribozyme logic circuits, modeling techniques
and software artifacts including simulators and oligonucleotide
libraries to the scientific community.