2024 News 2024: Faculty Focus: The impact and connections to the 2024 Nobel Prizes in science

UMass Dartmouth faculty members reflect on the impact and their connections to the latest prize winners

With the recent announcements of the 2024 Nobel Prizes racing around the world, two UMass Dartmouth professors reflected on how their research connects to world-changing discoveries and the impact the prizes will have on scientific discovery.

The Nobel Prize in Physics for machine learning and artificial neural networks was applauded by Professor of Mathematics Sigal Gottlieb, who leads the Center for Scientific Computing and Data Science Research at UMass Dartmouth.

For Gottlieb, it was no surprise that the "prize for AI was in Physics: so much of modern physics is advanced by computational approaches, including machine learning," she said.

Researchers like Professor Ming Shao, Professor Scott Field, Professor Vijay Varma, Professor Sarah Caudill, and Professor Yanlai Chen apply machine learning and neural networks to gravitational waves and adversarial learning.

"This field (Scientific Computing) is crucial for fields like physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, where complex phenomena are often difficult or impossible to study through traditional experimentation alone," said Gottlieb.

Their work underscores the importance of computational approaches in modern physics and engineering.

Gamifying scientific discoveries

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists, including University of Washington School of Medicine researcher David Baker, who used computational design to predict protein structures.

UMassD Professor of Computer & Information Science Firas Khatib, who trained under Baker, has made protein structure determination a central focus of his research.

Remarking on the importance of studying proteins, Khatib states that, for example, "COVID-19 is made up of a bunch of proteins, and so if we want to fight diseases like COVID, we need to know exactly what those proteins look like. That is the problem of protein structure determination, solving the structure of all these proteins so small that you can't see them with a microscope."

To help the discipline move forward to identify new proteins, Khatib's citizen science game "Foldit" lets the public help solve complicated protein structures, showing how crowdsourcing can drive science forward.

"This is what we did with Foldit during the pandemic. We allowed our players to design a new protein (that doesn't exist in nature) that would inhibit or block the Spike protein of Covid-19," Khatib explains. Baker led the development of "Foldit" and was Khatib's post-doc advisor.