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News
Dowling College Receives Grant From National Science Foundation
Funding To Support Efficient Calculation of Molecular Surfaces
The United States National Science Foundation has awarded Dowling College a three-year grant of $147,414 to fund important research into the efficient calculation of molecular surfaces. The grant is part of the NSF Information Technology Research Program.
The funding will help support the work of Professor Herbert J. Bernstein of the Dowling
College Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and his students who have been doing research into better approaches to the calculation of the so-called Lee-Richards surfaces of molecules. Such calculated surfaces are helpful in the understanding of interactions among biologically active molecules.
Work on this project began in 2002 with a joint investigation by Dr. Bernstein and six of his students of existing surface rendering algorithms. That work was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, held in Salt Lake City in March 2003. Dr. Bernstein's student co-authors are Petko S. Ivanov, Parag Jain, Daniel Osei-Kuffuor, Vencislav S. Stanev, Rohit Tripathi, and Peter N. Zhivkov.
Dowling students work as research assistants for the project, learning how to work with cutting-edge molecular graphics software and biologically important data as they make changes and improvements to algorithms.
"For larger molecules the computational demands of the calculation can make it difficult for computers to show real-time motion of molecules," Professor Bernstein said. "In this new project, my students and I seek to improve surface rendering algorithms that are more appropriate to this task and by embedding an awareness of display resolution in the algorithms used."
As the algorithms are developed, they will be released in the widely use molecular graphics program RasMol, that is maintained by Professor Bernstein. Because more than 1,000 users per week worldwide download new releases of RasMol, a significant impact can be expected from the new algorithms.
About Dowling College
Dowling College is an independent, coeducational college that serves more than 6,500 students at
its historic Rudolph Campus on the banks of the Connetquot River in Oakdale, NY, and the 105-acre
Brookhaven Campus in eastern Long Island and a business center located near the Nassau-Suffolk
border in Melville. Dowling offers Bachelor′s, Master′s, and Doctoral degrees in several
disciplines through its four schools: Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Education.
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