Prof. Heather Ruskin - Project Suggestions

(1) A primer for gene sequence analysis through Perl.

The effort of the Human Genome Project is generally well known - in outline. What is less well- known is what happens to all the data? The project aims to build a "primer package", based on the excellent string-handling facilities of Perl, to look at some of the basic problems in matching and identifying gene sequences and to provide an introductory tutorial set.

(2) Voronoi Polygons

 Some of the statistical properties, (even in two dimensions) of the Voronoi tesellation are unknown despite numerous applications. This project aims to obtain distributions of the side lengths and other properties of the polygons tesellating both random and clustered nuclei in the plane for given polygon groupings, and to classify these distributions.

(3) Spatial Factor in Modelling Epidemics

Cellular automata are stylized "universes" defined by simple rules, much like those of a board game. Given a suitable set of rules, this simple operating mechanism is sufficient to support a whole hierarchy of structures and phenomena. In particular, cellular automata supply useful models for many investigations in the natural and computational sciences. One such application is the modelling of epidemics. This project is designed to employ cellular automata models to investigate spatial clustering effects and migration on the spread of simple epidemics.

Contact Heather Ruskin