National Science Foundation
Mathematical and Physical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
My postdoctoral research was funded by an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. I worked with Dr. Dianne O'Leary at the University of Maryland. The purpose of this NSF fellowship is to support future leaders in the mathematical sciences by enabling them to participate in research environments that will have maximal impact on their future scientific development.
Department of Energy
Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
As a recipient of the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, I would like to acknowledge and thank the DOE and Krell Institute for supporting my research goals and graduate studies. The CSGF fellowship program supports graduate students in a variety of science, math and engineering fields.
The fellowship encourages an interdisciplinary approach to the study of computational science, requiring fellows to take a combination of math, computer science and science/engineering courses. In addition to monetary support, fellows participate in a 12-week research practicum at one of the DOE national labs and attend an annual conference in Washington D.C.
For more information regarding the fellowship, please visit http://www.krellinst.org/csgf/index.shtml.
To visit my profile, see http://www.krellinst.org/doecsgf/alumni/listing/fship.cgi?-w+2006_chung and to learn more about current fellows, see http://www.krellinst.org/doecsgf/fellows/listing/fellows_alph.php.
DOE CSGF Essay Contest
As a CSGF fellow, I wrote a non-technical essay describing my research to a general audience. I was the 2006 essay contest winner, and my essay was published in the following contest journal:
Compose: the DOE CSGF Annual Essay Contest Journal (2006)
See "Making Blurry Images a Thing of the Past"
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Practicum Experience
Another wonderful research experience while on the DOE CSGF was the opportunity to work for 3 months during Summer 2007 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California.
Many thanks to my mentor and supervisor: Chao Yang
Research Project: High Performance 3-D Image Reconstruction for Molecular Structure Determination
A Brief Description:
The goal of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstruction is to take a collection of 2-D projection images from various angular orientations and recover a 3-D volume representation. Accurate volume reconstruction can provide important information on complex molecular structures and their assemblies. However, the reconstruction process can be computationally challenging for large-volume structures, due to massive data and memory requirements. Current parallel implementations of reconstruction algorithms are inadequate for computing large-volume macromolecule structures, even on today's state-of-the-art high performance supercomputers.
During my practicum assignment, I implemented a new data distribution scheme for cryo-EM reconstruction whereby both the 2-D projection images and the 3-D volume can be distributed on a 2-D processor grid. This allows for the efficient reconstruction of large-volume structures. In addition, I introduced a Lanczos-based reconstruction algorithm for cryo-EM data and showed that this algorithm computes better reconstructions than current methods.
For more information, see my poster:
High Performance 3-D Image Reconstruction for Molecular Structure Determination