COLLOQUIUM Kamal Al Nasr Abstract The development process of new drugs can cost on average $4 billion. Therefore, it is strategic to apply robust computational approaches to cover a broader chemical space like computer-aided drug design while reducing the number of compounds that must be synthesized and tested in vitro to keep costs low. Protein structural information is a crucial input for computer-aided drug design. Conventional determination techniques such as X-ray crystallography are time consuming and fail with proteins that are hard to crystallize. Likewise, traditional computational techniques are unsuccessful with many types of proteins such as membrane and macromolecular proteins that make up more than the half of contemporary drug targets. In contrast, Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) is a biophysics technique that generates volumetric images to determine structures of macromolecular complexes and assembles. However, it is challenging to determine the atomic structures from images generated at sub-nanometer resolution using cryo-EM. In addition, the volume of prospective sub-nanometer EM images to be analyzed has rapidly grown. Therefore, powerful computational methods such as de novo modeling are thus needed to make use of the available cryo-EM data. In this presentation, I will present some challenging problems and computational approaches to use the non-atomic images of cryo-EM to model protein structures. Novel algorithms, image processing techniques, and data analysis will be presented to overcome the hinder of resolution problem of cryo-EM. Dr. Kamal Al Nasr is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Tennessee State University since August 2013. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from Yarmouk University, Jordan in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Dr. Al Nasr received another Master's degree in Computer Science from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM in 2011. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA in 2012. During his Ph.D. study, he was awarded College of Science's university fellowship on July 2010. He Joined the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, Washington, D.C. as a postdoctoral research scientist in 2012. His research interest is centered on developing efficient computational methods for protein structure prediction in de novo modeling. Specifically, he focuses on using Electron Cryo-Microscopy (cryo-EM), high performance computing, data analytics, and graph theory to design algorithms, which efficiently predict the 3-dimensional structure of proteins. During his structural bioinformatics research, Dr. Al Nasr has written several peer-reviewed papers in national and international journals and proceedings. Further, Dr. Al Nasr has two active grants from national agencies (i.e., NSF and NIH) to support his research. Date: Mar. 23 2018 Time: 10:15-11:15 am Place: Innovation Center, Room 2277