BATON ROUGE – Six LSU faculty members, who are leaders in their respective fields, have been selected to receive the Rainmaker Award for Research and Creative Activity from the LSU Office of Research & Economic Development, or ORED. Rainmakers are faculty members who balance their teaching and research responsibilities while extending the impact of their work to the world beyond academia.
“The definition of a Rainmaker is ‘a person whose influence can initiate progress.’ We recognize these exceptional faculty whose dedication and resilience represent the best of us all,” said LSU Vice President of Research & Economic Development Sam Bentley.
The Rainmakers include faculty who are at the early, middle and senior stages of their careers. They have established track records in securing external research funding and publishing in high-impact journals.
In partnership with Campus Federal Credit Union, ORED awards six Rainmakers each year.
“Campus Federal Credit Union has been a part of the LSU community since 1934. Started by faculty, we remain committed to excellence in serving our members alongside these exceptional Rainmakers, to make the lives better for everyone in the communities we serve,” said Campus Federal Credit Union President and Chief Executive Officer Jane Verret.
Each of the following award-winning faculty members has met one or more of the criteria for high-quality research or creative activities and scholarship. The criteria include, but are not limited to: publication in a high-impact journal(s); a highly cited work; external awards; invited presentations at national and international meetings; high journal publication productivity; critically acclaimed book publication(s), performance(s), exhibit(s) or theatrical production(s); high grant productivity and for more senior candidates, outstanding citation records and high-impact invited presentations at national and international meetings.
*See full story at: https://www.lsu.edu/mediacenter/news/2020/04/20research_rainmakers2019.php
Mid-Career Scholar
Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
Michal Brylinski, Department of Biological Sciences, College of Science and Center for Computation & Technology
Associate Professor Michael Brylinski’s research focus is on the design and development of novel tools for the modeling and analysis of biological networks. His field of computational systems biology can be considered a complex platform that integrates many algorithms from different research areas such as structural bioinformatics, functional genomics, cheminformatics and pharmacogenomics. He applies various tools to study the evolution and organization of pathways into biological networks with the primary application in modern drug discovery and design.
He has combined his training as a pharmacist and as a researcher as part of the interdisciplinary LSU team that competed for the IBM Watson AI X Prize to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to advance new drug discovery. Brylinski received his Ph.D. from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and conducted post-doctoral research at Georgia Tech before joining the faculty at LSU in 2012.
Publish Date:
04-20-2020
