Elena Zaslavsky Department of Computer Science Princeton University 35 Olden Street Princeton, NJ 08544 Office: 414 CS Building Office phone: (609) 258-1795 Email: elenaz [at] cs [dot] princeton [dot] edu

I am now in a research position at the Computer Science department of Princeton University. I run an interdisciplinary graduate training Program in Integrative Information, Computer and Application Sciences (PICASso). It is geared toward computationally-oriented students across different departments. Among the many exciting activities are two seminar series, one in Interdisciplinary Computational Science and the other in the Biological Sciences (drop me a note if you'd like to give a talk).

On the research end my interests lie in computational biology. I have done some work in applying optimization techniques to the problem of motif finding in genomic data, which can roughly be understood as searching for patterns in protein or DNA sequences. I am also interested in regulatory networks, and I am now involved in the PRIME Immune Modeling center working on the broader problem of understanding the dendritic cell signaling response to viruses.

Selected Publications:

• E. Zaslavsky and M. Singh: A combinatorial optimization approach for diverse motif finding applications. Algorithms for Molecular Biology 2006, 1:13. [Pubmed Abstract] [Publisher full text].
• C. Kingsford, E. Zaslavsky, and M. Singh: A Compact Mathematical Programming Formulation for DNA Motif Finding. Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2006), Springer, pp. 233-245 [Publisher full text].
• E. Zaslavsky: Algorithms for Representation and Discovery of Transcription Factor Binding Sites. Ph.D. Thesis, Princeton University, 2006. [Full Text].
• E. Zaslavsky, R. Osada, M. Singh: Comparative analysis of methods for representing and searching for transcription factor binding sites. Bioinformatics 2004, 20(18):3516-25. [Pubmed Abstract] [Publisher full text] [Software].

Education:

Ph.D., Princeton University, January 2006 (Computer Science, advisor: Mona Singh)
M.A., Princeton University, 2002 (Computer Science)
B.S., Queens College of CUNY, 1998 (Computer Science and Mathematics)

Invited Talks:

Motif finding using loopy belief propagation:

• Rutgers University, BioMaPS Institute for Quantitative Biology, May 7, 2008.

A combinatorial optimization approach for motif finding:

• Rutgers University, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Colloquium, November 28, 2006.
• New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Department of Computer Science Colloquium, October 30, 2006.
• Princeton University, PICASso Computation and Data Analysis in Biology and Information Sciences Seminar Series, February 22, 2006.