Young Researcher Award

Assoc Prof Sung Wing-Kin

Ph D, B Sc (University of Hong Kong)
Department of Computer Science

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Computational biology
• Design and analysis of algorithms

RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

• Pioneer in time-and-space efficient algorithms for constructing full-text indices, like suffix array (SA) and compressed suffix array (CSA)
• One of the leading teams in the area of indexed approximate string matching
• Developed an efficient local alignment method which takes less than a minute to align a pattern of length 3000 with the human genome and guarantees to find all local alignments (versus BLAST which is a heuristics)
• Developed the currently most sensitive and most specific motif finder SPACE for detecting DN A motifs and the corresponding binding sites
• Published a series of methods for constructing/comparing phylogenetic trees/networks

RESEARCH STRENGTHS

• Innovatively apply computing science algorithms to resolve genomics problems
• Experienced in collaborating with people from multi-disciplines, including computer scientists, statisticians, and biologists

PUBLICATION CREDITS

• Published more than 130 refereed conference and journal papers including SIAM Journal on Computing, SODA, STOC, FOCS, Bioinformatics, Cell, and Nature with over 700 citations
• Author/co-author of five book chapters related to bioinformatics and algorithm

INTERNATIONAL STANDING

• Programme committee of key international conferences like International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) and International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW )
• A joint winner of the BCL6 target gene finding challenge in the DREAM2 competition (2007)

AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

• National Science Award (2006)
• Forum on Information Technology (FIT ) best paper award (2003)

RESEARCH ASPIRATION
Developing new informatics tools to enhance our understanding of the biological systems.