Physics/Mathematics/Computer Science

The interaction of highly energetic particles with plasmas plays a major role in the evolution of the universe and gives rise to many astrophysical processes that are not yet fully understood. Our collaboration, consisting of groups from France and the USA, aims at creating these processes within a laboratory, which permits a high degree of control and insight into parameters that are otherwise not accessible.

Automated decisions are taking a prominent place in our societies in various domains ranging from medical diagnosis, to justice decisions or college admissions. For this to be for the better, we require these decisions to be fair and to take into account the diversity of the population. How can we rely on an automated decision if we are not guaranteed that the procedure does not introduce a bias or amplify an existing one?

Biomolecules such as protein and RNA are flexible to form complexes and perform their cellular function. Advances in X-ray crystallography, in particular the capabilities of the unique X-ray Free Electron Laser (LCLS) at SLAC, and other imaging techniques exceedingly provide insights into how biomolecules and their complexes move to perform their functions.

The widespread use of patient Electronic Health Records in hospitals generates large volumes of data offering exciting opportunities for novel discoveries in medicine. Indeed, we consider these records for a secondary use that is to constitute patient cohorts useful to experiment complex biomedical hypotheses. For instance, these medical records are used to monitor the safety of drugs and to alert about drugs that are prescribed but should be withdrawn from the market.

A plasma is what can be called the fourth state of matter. Thisis an electrically conductive gas. As the other states of matter, plasmas are everywhere around us. For example, lightning strikes or high temperature flames are plasmas. In the universe, stars can be designated as spheres of hot plasma.

The volume of data in biomedicine is constantly increasing. A key aspect to address biomedical data integration and semantic interoperability is the use of terminologies and ontologies as a common denominator to structure biomedical data and make them interoperable. However, the great number of developed ontologies and their heterogeneity have raised the problem of ontology matching, which consists in automatically finding mappings (correspondences) between entities of different ontologies.

Biomolecules such as proteins interact with one another to ensure our cells’ good health and functioning, and as such, the 3D atomic structure of these interactions is an important target of biological and pharmaceutical research. The recent developments in virtual reality (VR) technology set the stage for a new generation of molecular visualization and analysis tools. Consequently, our international team of researchers proposes to use VR to bring an intuitive and immersive user interface to very powerful computational chemistry algorithms.