Patrice Koehl, a computer scientist who studies molecular biology, and Benjamin Morris, a mathematician who works in probability, have been awarded prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships worth $45,000 each over two years.

Koehl holds a joint appointment as associate professor of computer science and also at the Genome Center. He studies how protein sequence, structure and function are related.

All proteins are made up of a sequence of amino acids, which folds up into a specific structure. How a protein interacts with its environment and performs its function depends on this structure. Millions of amino acid sequences occur in nature, but only 30,000 protein structures are currently known, and most fall into a relatively small number of basic shapes, Koehl said.

Koehl joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2004. Originally from France, he earned the equivalent of a master's degree in applied mathematics but then earned a doctorate in biophysics at the University of Strasbourg.

"I'm very happy and very lucky I decided to do a doctorate in experimental biophysics," he said, adding that doing bench research gave him insight into how biologists approach problems, compared to mathematicians or computer scientists. "So many differences exist between scientists, and we need to find common ground."

From 1997 to 2004, Koehl was a research associate in computational structural biology at Stanford University. He is on leave from a permanent position at the Centre National de la Recherce Scientifique in France. He wants to keep the French connection open to make it easier to bring students and postdoctoral researchers to his lab, he said.

Morris is an associate professor in the department of mathematics. He is interested in randomness and probability, especially mixing times for Markov chains — put more simply, how many shuffles it takes to mix a deck of cards.

Card games

There are several mathematical models for studying card shuffling, Morris said. Before joining UC Davis last year, he solved one of the most intractable problems in the area, by giving the first analysis of the "Thorp Shuffle," named after Ed Thorp, the mathematician and gambler who wrote a classic book on card game strategy, Beat the Dealer.

Morris is now working on a "card shuffling" model for the evolution of a simple genome.

Morris earned his bachelor's degree and doctorate from UC Berkeley, and carried out postdoctoral research with card shuffling expert Percy Diaconis at Stanford University and then with Yuval Peres at Stanford University. He was an assistant professor of mathematics at Indiana University, and spent a year as a visiting researcher in the theory group at Microsoft Research before joining UC Davis in 2005.

The Sloan Foundation awards 116 fellowships each year to outstanding young scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, computational or evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, economics or computer science.

The fellowships are intended to provide support to young researchers at the point in their careers when they are establishing independent research projects. Since the program began in 1955, 34 Sloan fellows have gone on to win Nobel prizes.

More details are available at www.sloan.org/programs/scitech_fellowships.htm