Associate Professor Keng Sung Wins
2008 NUS
Young Researcher Award
A
ssociate Professor Ken Sung Wing-Kin has been conferred the
NUS Young Researcher Award for 2008. The award recognises
his work in algorithm and its application to bioinformatics.
In particular, his work has contributed to a project that
broke a long-standing space-time barrier and showed that
full-text indices such as compressed suffix arrays can be
constructed in optimal time and optimal space. Through
utilising such an index, he and his team have further
developed methods to align DNA sequence or gene to some
large genome like human and mouse. Unlike heuristic-based
software like BLAST, the solution guarantees finding all
good matches within reasonable time. The method is also
applied to locate genes and transcription factor binding
sites in human and mouse genome in the collaboration with
Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS).
A/P Sung also generated algorithms with applications in
pathogen detection and DNA binding site discovery.
Particularly, the former contribution enables accurate
pathogen detection in human sample without using pathogen
specific primer. Through experiments on some real blood
sample, he and his team demonstrated that their method is
highly sensitive and specific. The method can also detect
co-infection without knowing the pathogens in the sample.
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Last Modified on: 11 April 2008
