Tong on MSU team awarded NSF Grant

Guowei Wei and Yang Wang, Professors of Mathematics and Yiying Tong, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, all from Michigan State University, have been awarded a
medium grant entitled "Geometric and topological approaches to biomolecular structure and dynamics" from the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.

Experimental exploration of self-organizing biomolecular systems, such as viruses, molecular motors and proteins in Alzheimer's disease, has been a dominating driving force in scientific discovery and innovation in the past few decades. Unfortunately, quantitative understanding of biomolecular structure, function, and dynamics severely lags behind the pace of the experimental progress. A crucial question is how to reduce the number of degrees of freedom, while retaining the fundamental physics in complex biological systems.

The proposed research addresses grand challenges in the structure, function and dynamics of self-organizing biomolecular systems due to exceptionally massive data sets. These challenges are tackled through the introduction of a new differential geometry based multiscale model, together with a multiresolution coarse grained method based on persistently stable manifolds in molecular dynamics data. This project uses a number of geometric and topological approaches to address the scaling issues, and offers innovative new approaches to an important area in massive data management, dimensionality reduction, computational mathematics and mathematical modeling.

(Date Posted: 2013-09-10)