Faculty & Research

Education

PhD, Biophysics and Computational Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999
BSc, Chemistry with Computer Science Option, University of Pittsburgh, 1988

Research Interests

The amount of scientific knowledge and information continues to rapidly increase. It is becoming increasingly difficult for scientists to make good, timely decisions based on all the relevant information as these data are scattered in many different locations, of various quality, possibly out of date, and simply not known to the scientist. My interests are in identifying and driving the key scientific questions that need to be answered and being able to integrate the information from the appropriate sources in a way that is intuitive to the scientist. One way that this is done is by using the Life Sciences Grid http://sourceforge.net/projects/lsg/ in the Discovery Target Assessment Tool, which asynchronously fires many plugins providing a myriad of content,  yet lets a scientist click on a question of interest and the answering plugin is surfaced. 

After receiving his B.S. in Chemistry with a Computer Science option from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, Dr. Dow joined Eli Lilly and Company focusing on computational chemistry. Following an AI Fellowship with Digital Equipment Corporation in neural networks, he worked on protein structure prediction and QSAR. In 1993, he took an educational leave, obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Biophysics and Computational Biology under Dr. Thomas Anastasio in 1999. At Lilly, he continued work using neural networks in clustering and analyzing microarray data. He is currently is a group leader in Discovery Informatics with team members in Indianapolis and in Singapore.