New NSF MRI Award to Prof. Rich Sharp

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Richard Sharp is the Principal Investigator of a new Major Research Instrumentation grant award from the National Science Foundation. The grant was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and will enable Sharp and a team of colleagues from both Computer Science and Biology to purchase a high performance computer and a microarray scanner. Together, the two instruments will enrich more than ten distinct research programs at St. Lawrence, including clarifying the role of DNA structure in gene transcription, understanding microbial communities through the phylogenetic analysis of gene sequences, examining patterns of gene expression during anoxia, and developing statistical methods to test significance in multivariate biological field data.