T. M. Murali

Photo of T. M. Murali Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
murali at cs dot vt dot edu
(540) 231-8534 (phone)

2160B Torgerson Hall (office address)
114 McBryde Hall (mailing address)
225 Stanger St (mailing address)
Blacksburg VA 24061

I am a Professor and the Associate Department Head for Research in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I am also the associate director for the Computational Tissue Engineering interdisciplinary graduate education program. I am affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology.

I joined Virginia Tech in 2003 as an Assistant Professor. From 2001 to 2003, I was a Senior Research Associate in the Bioinformatics Programme at Boston University, where I worked with Simon Kasif. Before joining Boston University, I worked at Compaq's Cambridge Research Lab. Till July 1999, I was a post-doc in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. I worked with Leo Guibas and Jean-Claude Latombe on problems arising in computational geometry, computer graphics, and robotics. In particular, I was working on the Tactical Mobile Robots project.

Before I came to Stanford, I was a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. From July 1993 to August 1998, I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Duke University, where my advisor Jeff Vitter moved from Brown University. I was a member of the Center for Geometric Computing at Duke. Before I started my graduate studies at Brown in 1991, I spent four years at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) getting a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering. My last two years in high school were spent at the pride of Luz Circle, Vidya Mandir, Madras.

In my research, I focus on problems in computational systems biology. Currently, I am working in the area of cellular response networks and their building blocks (network legos), gene function prediction (GAIN, Art, MENGO), host-pathogen protein-protein interactions (prediction, landscape) biclustering algorithms and their applications (xMotif, visualisation, XcisClique, Arabidopsis CO2, RankGene), and conserved protein interaction modules (GraphHopper). I am also interested in the problem of identifying ligand migration pathways in proteins such as myoglobin. In previous research, I studied problems in computational geometry, especially those motivated by applications in computer graphics, robotics, and geographic information systems. In my Ph.D. thesis, I studied the problem of hidden-surface removal.

T. M. Murali (murali at cs DOT vt DOT edu)