TCNJ’s MUSE (Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience) program runs every summer. This year, Dr. Dimitris Papamichail worked with Joie Murphy, Nathan Gould, and Dylan Wulf – all rising sophomore Computer Science Majors – to complete their specific projects, described below by Dr. Papamichail:

Joie Murphy and Dylan Wulf worked on a project that aims to develop a set of computational tools to aid the computational textual criticism of Latin texts.  An ultimate goal of traditional textual criticism is the reconstruction of the archetype of a given work, where various manuscripts from different time periods and from different regions are available as the source of texts for reconstruction; some are only fragments. To tackle this goal, it is important to figure out, by comparing differences and similarities among multiple versions the work, whether one version is derived from another, and whether two or more versions descend from a hypothetical version that is now lost. The students worked on methods to construct and evaluate trees representing the relationships of extant and hypothetical extinct documents.

Nathan Gould and Oliver Hendy (senior Biology major) studied algorithmic issues behind synthetic gene optimization and the approaches that different computational tools have adopted to redesign gene DNA sequences and maximize desired coding features. The students studied an extended bibliography in synthetic biology and gene redesign, and utilized test cases to demonstrate the efficiency of each gene design approach, as well as identify their strengths and limitations of the available tools. This study resulted in a manuscript that has been submitted for publication.

For more information on MUSE, please visit TCNJ’s webpage:  http://fscollab.pages.tcnj.edu/muse/