May 13, 2013 – Dr. Md Tamjidul Hoque, Assistant Professor of Computer Science has been awarded $130,875 RCS (Research Competitiveness Subprogram) grant from Louisiana BoR (Board of Regents) over three years with institutional match of $47,266, totaling $178,141. The proposal has been ranked #1. The project entitled “Accurate prediction of drug-potent proteins in critical diseases”, focuses on developing an effective disorder-predictor using novel machine learning approaches, which will help identify critical diseases such as malaria, cancer and cardio-vascular disease-causing proteins. Further, the combination of statistical energy function with evolution-derived properties will form an effective energy function, which will accurately discrimination near-native structures from decoys. An effective sampling algorithm will be combined with the energy function, which will effectively sample the astronomical search space of protein structure. This approach is extended toward finding drug-potent protein.