Before coming to Illinois, I was a postdoc with Aravind Joshi at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and also a frequent visitor to Ken Dill's research group at UCSF. And before that, I did a PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh with Mark Steedman.
I have two main areas of interest: computational linguistics and computational biology.
When I am wearing my linguistics hat, I work mostly on syntax and parsing, in particular on wide-coverage parsing and grammar extraction (currently English and German) with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), an efficiently parseable, linguistically expressive formalism.
When I am wearing my biology hat, I also work on parsing, but then I parse proteins, not sentences, i.e. strings of amino acids, not strings of words. More specifically (and correctly), I work on dynamic programming algorithms for hierarchical protein folding and ab initio kinetics. I am using a simplified lattice model to develop these algorithms, but future work will move to more realistic representations.
Just as native speakers of a language have no problem to recover the underlying grammatical structure (and hence meaning) of a sentence, proteins fold spontaneously and rapidly into their correct three-dimensional structures. As a computer scientist, I want to know what makes these search processes in nature so fast and so reliable, and how we can exploit these principles in our algorithms!