Suzanne J. Matthews

Links

About Me

I'm a PhD Candidate (fourth year student) in the department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. I defended my dissertation on March 1, 2012, and am expecting to graduate in May 2012. I completed my M.S. in Computer Science in May 2008 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received my B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer in 2006. My research experience is in Computational Biology, particularly High performance Phylogenetic Analysis and Protein Folding.

My Travels

Click on the above link to be transported to my flickr profile. I have posted many pictures from my travels around the U.S. and beyond. All pictures are distributed under a by-nc-nd cc license.

Welcome!

Welcome to my homepage! Please feel free to look around, and to contact me if you have any questions.

I'm a PhD Candidate in the department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. For academic year 2011-2012, I was recognized as Texas A&M Dissertaiton Fellow. On March 1, 2012, I successfully defended my dissertation. I am planning to graduate in May 2012. My advisor is Dr. Tiffani Williams. Our lab's research focuses on large scale phylogenetic analysis, particularly those dealing with groups of trees in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

I was previously a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I received my B.S. in Computer Science in 2006, and my M.S. in Computer Science in 2008. My Masters thesis work was on the visualization of protein unfolding pathways. You can view my full C.V. here.

As a research assistant, my current research focuses on creating novel algorithms to analyze and manage large collections of phylogenetic trees. My goal is to design new methods that will be useful in the construction of the Tree of Life.

Computational Phylogenetics is a branch of Computational Biology that studies how different sets of organisms (taxa) are related to one another through the use of algorithmic techniques commonly found in Computer Science, particularly in the areas of Data Mining and Parallel Computing. The overarching goal of this area of research is to determine how exactly sets of organisms are related, and to one day determine the structure of the Tree of Life.