Science speaker blends biology and metaphor

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David Searls

Linguistic approaches to molecular biology offer new ways of modeling and simulating biological processes.

RIT College of Science Distinguished Speaker David Searls will present “Molecules, Languages, and Automata” at 1 p.m. Dec. 5 in Gosnell Hall, room A300. He adopts a syntactical view to pattern matching and searching through the genes and other modules in DNA sequences and building predictive algorithms based on grammatical approaches to the expression of structures in RNA.

Searls co-founded the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Biology and Informatics Laboratory, while holding joint faculty appointments in genetics and computer and information science. He then spent 13 years at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, where he was senior vice president of computational biology. For the last five years, Searls has consulted and pursued his own research in molecular linguistics.

For more information, contact Susan Tontarski, COS events and Web specialist, at sjtsse@rit.edu.