Seminar: Navigating towards COMPASS
T.M. Murali
Professor and
Associate Department Head for Research
Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Friday, September 20, 2024
2:30 - 3:45PM
3100 Torgersen Hall
Abstract
'The time has come,' the Virus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of flus — and ethics — and healing facts —
Of Babbages — and emergings —
And how Hep C is spoiling host —
And whether poxes have wings.'
I will present the motivations, aspirations, and goals of the NSF COMPASS Center for pandemic prediction and prevention. Multiple disciplines must be fused cohesively to address even a small subset of open challenges in pandemic science. In COMPASS, we meld computer science, virology, chemical and environmental engineering, public health, bioethics, science communication, and the arts, all encapsulated within the framework of empowering the public. I will discuss how computer science plays a central role in the broad context of the significant research challenges we seek to tackle. A major focus of COMPASS is to train the next generation of researchers who will face a world where new pathogens with pandemic potential may continue to emerge. I will outline the different programs we are developing across all levels. Finally, I will describe how a graduate student can have an unexpected, profound, and long-term influence on their advisor's career. I will highlight the power of abstraction: how seemingly different biological questions can be addressed using similar computational approaches.
Biography
T. M. Murali is a professor and associate department head for research in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He directs the NSF COMPASS Center and the Virginia Tech Destination Area on Pandemic Prediction and Prevention. He is the associate director for the Computational Tissue Engineering interdisciplinary graduate education program. Murali's research group develops phenomenological and predictive models dealing with the function and properties of large-scale molecular interaction networks in the cell. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his Sc. M. and Ph. D. degrees from Brown University. Murali received the College of Engineering (COE) New Assistant Professor Award in 2005, the Outstanding Dissertation Advisor Award from Virginia Tech in 2008, a COE Faculty Fellowship from 2012 to 2015, and the COE Excellence in Research Award in 2016. He is a Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and an elected member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.