Duke Gets $10 Million from NSF

Developing high-powered computer software to calculate protein shapes, and creating self-assembling "DNA computers" are two of five Duke-led projects to be supported by a total of more than $10 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. The grants announced on Wednesday were part of the NSF's $90- million Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative aimed at spurring advances in information technology, an area of growing importance to the economy. Among the largest awards is a five-year, $7.2 million grant to a Duke-led consortium to apply techniques of "geometric computing" to biology. Other members of the consortium are UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. A&T University in Greensboro and Stanford. Duke project leaders are Herbert Edelsbrunner, Arts & Sciences professor of computer science; Pankaj Agarwal, who is the Earl D. McLEan Jr. professor of computer science; and Homme Hellinga, associate professor of biochemistry. The function of proteins as enzymes and other critical cellular components depends profoundly on their shape. Yet powerful geometric methods of calculating protein shape have not been widely applied to computational biology. Understanding and predicting protein shape is one of the most important unsolved problems in biology. The new Duke-led effort will seek to develop software that overcomes the barriers to such applications. A $2 million NSF grant also has been awarded to John Reif, professor of computer science, and his colleagues to explore how DNA molecules can be used as self-assembling "computers." Reif is currently director of the 10-university National Consortium in Biomolecular Computing aimed at using the natural propensity of DNA to form ordered structures as the basis for molecular computers that can solve specialized problems. Other Duke grants announced by NSF were

$362,000 to Amin Vahdat, assistant professor of computer science, for "System Support for Automatic and Consistent Replication of Internet Services"

$285,000 to Carla Ellis, professor of computer science, for "System Support for Energy Management in Mobile and Embedded Workloads," and

$252,000 to Jeffrey Vitter, who is the Gilbert, Louis, and the Edward Lehrman professor and chair of computer science, for "Algorithms for Active Storage"

Said President Clinton in NSF's announcement of the NSF grants: "This initiative will help strengthen America's leadership in a sector that has accounted for one-third of U.S. economic growth in recent years. "High technology is generating jobs that pay 85 percent more than the average private sector wage. I am pleased that the National Science Foundation is expanding its investment in long-term information technology research. I urge the Congress to provide full funding for NSF so that they can continue to make these kinds of investments in America's future," he said. Sponsors of the legislation that funded the grants included U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat from Lillington.