Lenwood S. Heath

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Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
College of Engineering
Computer Science
ProfessorAppointed: 1987
Professional Headshot of Lenwood S. Heath

Mailing Address

Department of Computer Science
114 McBryde Hall
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0106
United States

Contact Information

Phone: (540) 231-4352
Fax: (540) 231-7040
Mobile: (540) 392-6672
heath@vt.edu
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~heath

Qualifications

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Computer Science, 1985.
M.S., University of Chicago, Mathematics, 1976.
B.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mathematics, 1975.

Expertise and Research Interests

I work on computationally solving discrete problems. By discrete I mean problems involving graphs, networks, symbolic computations, and discrete geometric sets. Often, these problems involve some kind of optimization, that is, finding the best possible solution to the problem. I have expertise in analyzing problems, determining how hard it will be to solve them computationally, and devising good algorithms for their solution.

Currently I am working on several projects in bioinformatics. One is to model the biological phenomenon of gene silencing in a computational fashion. Others involve research in molecular evolution that requires computational analysis of genomes.

I am taking a major role in the computational biology and bioinformatics initiative at Virginia Tech, combining the work of biologists, computer scientists, and statisticians to solve biological problems.

In addition, I am starting to get involved in biomedical informatics in collaboration with medical researchers.

Other Expertise

I have worked in symbolic computation, information retrieval, graph drawing, and algorithm animation. I have consulted regarding efficient allocation of bandwidth in a satellite system.

Future Research

My future research will emphasize computational biology and bioinformatics. I intend to work on fundamental computational problems that biologists need to solve to analyze experimental data and to develop models of cell functioning. I will also try to involve as many biologists and computer scientists in joint bioinformatics research at Virginia Tech. I have been working ot heighten awareness of bioinformatics among computer science faculty and students.

Industrial Relevance

Bioinformatics is obviously important for pharmaceuticals and other medical applications. There will also be applications in agriculture relevant to both plants and animals. There may be applications in the development of new materials with special properties by biological means.

Keywords

COS Keywords:

Algebra, Algorithms, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Algorithms, Computer Graphics, Computer Theory, Data Fusion, Data Mining, Discrete Mathematics, Gene Expression, Genomics, Knowledge Representation, Local Area Networks, Logic, Proteomics, Wide Area Networks.

Additional Terms:

Algorithms, Bioinformatics, Computational Algebra, Computational Biology, Computational Geometry, Genomics, Graph Theory, Medical Informatics, Networks, Symbolic Algebra, Symbolic Computation.

Memberships

IEEE Computer Society
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Previous Positions

1993-2003, Associate Professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, College of Engineering, Computer Science
1987-1993, Assistant Professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
1985-1987, Instructor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Applied Mathematics

Funding Received

  • National Science Foundation (NSF): ITR: Understanding Stress Resistance Mechanisms in Plants: Multimodal Models Integrating Experimental Data, Databases, and the Literature, $499,973, Sep 15, 2002 to Aug 31, 2005.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF): User-Centered Database from the Computer Science Literature, $443,391, Sep 15, 1991 to Feb 28, 1995.
  • United States Department of Defense (DOD): Dryophile Genes to Engineer Stasis-Recovery of Human Cells, $4,532,622, May 1, 2001 to Apr 30, 2006.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF): Analyzing Parallel Architectures With Algebraic Topology, $40,000, Jul 15, 1990 to Dec 31, 1992.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF): A System for Symbolic Computation in Hopf Algebras, $180,000, Aug 16, 1998 to Jul 31, 2001.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF): A Microarray Experiment Management System, $600,000, Aug 1, 2001 to Aug 31, 2004.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF): ITR-(NHS)-(sim): Computational Models for Gene Silencing: Elucidating a Pervasive Biological Defensive Response, $1,500,000, 2004 to 2009.

Publications

  • Lenwood S. Heath, Allan A. Sioson (2009) Semantics of Multimodal Network Models, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, In Press
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Allan A. Sioson (2009) Multimodal Networks: Structure and Operations, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, In Press
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan (2009) The Problem Solving Handbook for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Springer, Unpublished, ISBN=978-038709759
  • Srinivasrao P. Mane, Cecilia Vasquez Robinet, Alexander Ulanov, Roland Schafleitner, Luz Tincopa, Amelie Gaudin, Giannina Nomberto, Carlos Alvarado, Christian Solis, Luis Avila Bolivar, Raul Blas, Oscar Ortega, Julio Solis, Ana Panta, Cristina Rivera, Ilanit Samolski, Doris H. Carbajulca, Meredith Bonierbale, Amrita Pati, Lenwood S. Heath, Hans J. Bohnert, Ruth Grene (2008) Molecular and Physiological Adaptation to Prolonged Drought Stress in the Leaves of two Andean Potato Genotypes, Functional Plant Biology, 35, 669-688
  • Jonathan I. Watkinson, Lori Hendricks, Allan A. Sioson, Lenwood S. Heath, Hans J. Bohnert, Ruth Grene (2008) Tuber Development Phenotypes in Adapted and Acclimated, Drought-stressed Solanum tuberosum ssp. andigena Have Distinct Expression Profiles of Genes Associated with Carbon Metabolism, Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, 46, 34-45
  • Amrita Pati, Ying Jin, Karsten Klage, Rich Helm, Lenwood S. Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan (2008) CMGSDB: Integrating Heterogeneous Caenorhabditis elegans Data Sources Using Compositional Data Mining, Nucleic Acids Research, 36, D69-76
  • Srinivasrao P. Mane, Cecilia Vasquez- Robinet, Allan A. Sioson, Lenwood S. Heath, Ruth Grene (2007) Early PLD alpha-Mediated Events in Response to Progressive Drought Stress in Arabidopsis: A Transcriptome Analysis, Journal of Experimental Botany, 58, 241-252
  • Jonathan I. Watkinson, Lori Hendricks, Allan A. Sioson, Cecilia Vasquez-Robinet, Lenwood S. Heath, Mary Schuler, Hans J. Bohnert, Merideth Bonierable, Ruth Grene (2006) Accessions of Solanum tuberosum ssp. andigena Show Differences in Photosynthetic Recovery After Drought Stress as Reflected in Gene Expression Profiles, Plant Science, 171, 745-758
  • P. H. Li, S. P. Mane, A. A. Sioson, C. V. Robinet, L. S. Heath, H. J. Bohnert, R. Grene (2006) Effects of Chronic Ozone Exposure on Gene Expression in Arabidopsis thaliana Ecotypes and in Thellungielia halophila, Plant Cell and Environment, 29, 854-868
  • P. H. Li, A. Sioson, S. P. Mane, A. Ulanov, G. Grothaus, L. S. Heath, T. M. Murali, H. J. Bohnert, R. Grene (2006) Response Diversity of Arabidopsis thaliana Ecotypes in Elevated [Co2] in the Field, Plant Molecular Biology, 62, 593-609
  • Allan A. Sioson, Lenwood S. Heath (2006) Some Fundamental Operations on Multimodal Networks in Biology, Philippine Computing Journal, 1, 13-22
  • Allan A. Sioson, Srinivasrao P. Mane, Pinghua Li, Wei Sha, Lenwood S. Heath, Hans J. Bohnert (2006) The Statistics of Identifying Differentially Expressed Genes in Expresso and TM4: A Comparison, BMC Bioinformatics, 7, 15 pages
  • Amrita Pati, Cecilia Vasquez- Robinet, Lenwood S. Heath, Ruth Grene (2006) XcisClique: Analysis of Regulatory Bicliques, BMC Bioinformatics, 7, 14 pages
  • Dennis J. Brueni, Lenwood S. Heath (2005) The PMU Placement Problem, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 19, 744-761
  • John C. Gordon, Jonathan B. Myers, Timothy Folta, Valia Shoja, Lenwood S. Heath, Alexey Onufriev (2005) H++: A Server for Estimating pK(a)s and Adding Missing Hydrogens to Macromolecules, Nucleic Acids Research, 33, W368-W371
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Calvin J. Ribbens, Sriram V. Pemmaraju (2004) Processor-Efficient Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 48, 589-608
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Nicholas A. Loehr (2004) Efficient Algorithms for Finding Conway Polynomials, Journal of Symbolic Computation, 38, 1003-1024
  • Jonathan I. Watkinson, Allan A. Sioson, Cecilia Vasquez-Robinet, Maulik Shukla, Deept Kumar, Margaret Ellis, Lenwood S. Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan, Boris I. Chevone, Layne T. Watson, Leonel Merwe van Zyl, Ulrika Egertsdotter, Ronald R. Sederoff, Ruth Grene (2003) Photosynthetic Acclimation is Reflected in Specific Patterns of Gene Expression in Drought-Stressed Loblolly Pine, Plant Physiology, 133 (4), 1702-1716
  • Lenwood S. Heath, John Paul C. Vergara (2003) Sorting by Short Swaps, Journal of Computational Biology, 10 (5), 775-789
  • Douglas J. Slotta, Lenwood S. Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan, Rich Helm, Malcolm Potts (2003) Clustering Mass Spectrometry Data using Order Statistics, Proteomics, 3 (9), 1687-1691
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan, Ronald R. Sederoff, Ross W. Whetten, Boris I. Chevone, Craig A. Struble, Vincent Y. Jouenne, Dawei Chen, Leonel Merwe van Zyl, and Ruth Grene, Studying the Functional Genomics of Stress Responses in Loblolly Pine using the Expresso Microarray Management System, Comparative and Functional Genomics, 3, 226-243, 2002
  • Ruth Grene, Neval Erturk, and Lenwood S. Heath, Role of Superoxide Dismutase (SODs) in Controlling Oxidative Stress in Plants, Journal of Experimental Botany, 53, 1331-1341, 2002
  • Edward L. Green, Lenwood S. Heath, and Craig A. Struble, Constructing Homomorphism Spaces and Endomorphism Rings, Journal of Symbolic Computation, 32, 101-117, 2001
  • Joseph L. Ganley and Lenwood S. Heath, The Pagenumber of k-Trees is O(k), Discrete Applied Mathematics, 109, 215-221, 2001
  • Arnold L. Rosenberg, Lenwood S. Heath (2001) Graph Separators, with Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 264 pages pages, ISBN=0-306-46464-0
  • Lenwood S. Heath and John Paul C. Vergara, Sorting by Short Block-Moves, Algorithmica, 28, 323-352, 2000
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Sriram V. Pemmaraju, and Ann Trenk, Stack and Queue Layouts of Directed Acyclic Graphs: Part I, SIAM Journal on Computing, 28, 1510-1539, 1999
  • Lenwood S. Heath and Sriram V. Pemmaraju, Stack and Queue Layouts of Directed Acyclic Graphs: Part II, SIAM Journal on Computing, 28, 1588-1626, 1999
  • Lenwood S. Heath and John Paul C. Vergara, Sorting by Bounded Block-Moves, Discrete Applied Mathematics, 88, 181-206, 1998
  • Lenwood S. Heath and John Paul C. Vergara, Edge-Packing in Planar Graphs, Theory of Computing Systems, 31, 629-662, 1998
  • Joseph L. Ganley and Lenwood S. Heath, An Experimental Evaluation of Local Search Heuristics for Graph Partitioning, Computing, 60, 121-132, 1998
  • Lenwood S. Heath and Sriram V. Pemmaraju, Stack and Queue Layouts of Posets, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 10, 599-625, 1997
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Graph Embeddings and Simplicial Maps, Theory of Computing Systems, 30, 51-65, 1997
  • Lenwood S. Heath, Deborah Hix, Lucy T. Nowell,William C. Wake, Guillermo A. Averboch, Eric Labow, Scott A. Guyer, Dennis J. Brueni, Robert K. France, Kaushal Dalal, and Edward A. Fox, Envision: A User-Centered Database of Computer Science Literature, Communications of the ACM, 38, 52-53, 1995
  • Lenwood S. Heath and Sriram V. Pemmaraju, New Results for the Minimum Weight Triangulation Problem, Algorithmica, 12, 533-552, 1994
  • Joseph L. Ganley and Lenwood S. Heath, Optimal and Random Partitions of Random Graphs, The Computer Journal, 37, 641-643, 1994
  • Joseph L. Ganley and Lenwood S. Heath, Heuristics for Laying Out Information Graphs, Computing, 52, 389-405, 1994

Profile Details

Last Updated: 3/10/2009

COS Expertise ID #844375
Reference this profile directly: http://myprofile.cos.com/heath4