Nakhleh wins CAREER award

Computer scientist will study evolution of biological networks

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Luay Nakhleh, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice and a specialist in bioinformatics, has been awarded a prestigious CAREER award by the National Science Foundation.

Luay Nakhleh

The coveted and highly competitive award goes to junior faculty members who are expected to become academic leaders in their respective fields of study. It will bring $500,000 in grant money to Nakhleh’s group over the next five years.

“My passion and my interest are in evolutionary questions,” Nakhleh said. “I am a firm believer in Dobzhansky‘s oft-cited statement that ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’

“That rings even more true today because we are getting so much data — proteomic, genomic, etc. — from multiple species and even from multiple individuals within the same species. The question is, how do we link all these data together? In my opinion, evolution is the right framework within which to answer this question.”

Within computational evolutionary biology, Nakhleh has so far focused most of his efforts on ”networks of evolution,” also known as phylogenetic networks. These are necessary to analyze non-treelike, or reticulate, evolutionary histories involving horizontal gene transfer, hybridization and recombination.

The CAREER project, on the other hand, focuses on the “evolution of networks.” Nakhleh will use the grant to develop tools for the evolutionary analysis of such interactions as those between proteins or genes. The project, he wrote, “will result in the development of new courses focused on evolutionary analysis of biological networks.”

Nakhleh, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin, joined Rice in 2004 and also holds appointments at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine. He received an Early Career Principal Investigator award from the Department of Energy in 2006.