Hello! I am a new master's student in the computational biology lab at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Michael Brudno. In this lab (as an undergraduate) I have developed FRESCO and helped with statistical calculations in SHRiMP (mostly as an undergraduate). I have also worked with Jerry Mitrovica in global Sea-Level Theory. Below, you can find a brief overview of my background, research interests and hobbies, and above you can surf to details about my research (including publications), cv and photography. My girlfriend, Monica Stanciu, works at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, you can visit her webpage here or here.

I was born in the small town of Satu-Mare, and grew up in several cities in wondrous Romania. With my family, I came to Canada when I was 12. I attended a wonderful high school near High Park in Toronto - Humberside College Institute - before coming to the University of Toronto for my bachelor studies. I began my studies in Computer Science and Architecture, but, convinced by an astronomy course, I changed my Specialist to Computer Science and Physics. In the summer of 2006 I was graciously accepted by Michael Brudno as a summer student despite my limited education in Biology - the start of my work in the Computational Biology lab where I find myself now, doing my masters. Starting in may 2007, as an undergraduate, I worked with Jerry Mitrovica advancing the theory of Sea-Level Variation, a similarly gracious opportunity given my limited knowledge in sea-level theory at the time.

I started my masters in September of 2008. I am currently working with Next Generation Sequencing data and working on several features of SHRiMP. I will include more updates about my main recent research project in early 2009 :).

As I described above, I also developed the FRESCO sequence aligner with Michael Brudno in 2006/7, and worked on Sea Level Theory with Jerry Mitrovica in 2007/8. The FRESCO aligner (PubMed ID 18229672) introduces the class of Rectangular Scoring Schemes for pairwise alignment, and allows for alignment under any scoring function from this wide class under polynomial time. The running time is improved with several heuristics. (abstract)

While the popular DNA sequence alignment tools incorporate powerful heuristics to allow for fast and accurate alignment of DNA, most of them still optimize the classical Needleman Wunsch scoring scheme. The development of novel scoring schemes is often hampered by the difficulty of finding an optimizing algorithm for each non-trivial scheme. In this paper we define the broad class of rectangle scoring schemes, and describe an algorithm and tool that can align two sequences with an arbitrary rectangle scoring scheme in polynomial time. Rectangle scoring schemes encompass some of the popular alignment scoring metrics currently in use, as well as many other functions. We investigate a novel scoring function based on minimizing the expected number of random diagonals observed with the given scores and show that it rivals the LAGAN and Clustal-W aligners, without using any biological or evolutionary parameters. The FRESCO program, freely available at http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/fresco, gives bioinformatics researchers the ability to quickly compare the performance of other complex scoring formulas without having to implement new algorithms to optimize them.

In sea level theory, we redefined several concepts in the theory of Sea-Level variation, and introduced sediment movement in our theory.I implemented a sea-level algorithm, with similarity to that of Kendall et. al. (2005), that includes the new definitions and sediment addition. The results are currently being evaluated and the relevant publication is to be submitted soon.

A new and quite exciting hobby of mine is photography - not just taking photographs, but experimenting with various techniques, post processing software and algorithms, new hardware and so on. To this end I've taken several CS photography-related courses (CSC320 - Introduction to Visual Computing, CSC420 - Introduction to Image Understanding and CSC2503 - Foundations of Computer Vision) and attended numerous talks. You can see my pictures on my photography section or my flickr photostream.

I also try to get in alot of soccer and tennis games, and have been extensively involved with the romanian students club in the past.