Ming-Ying Leung, Ph.D.

Professor of Mathematical Sciences,
Director of Bioinformatics Program

Markov Models, Poisson Approximations, Scan Statistics,
Statistical Bioinformatics, and Molecular Sequence Analysis

Biographical Sketch

To Her Math Homepage

Dr. Leung's research centers on probabilistic modeling and statistical bioinformatics, focusing on the applications of Markov models, Poisson approximations, and the scan statistics to DNA sequence analysis. She applied the scan statistics to identify unusual clusters of palindromes in the DNA genomes of herpesviruses. An algorithm for predicting viral replication origins based on palindrome clusters and other sequence patterns is currently being developed. In RNA viruses, such as the virus causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), their genome structures may shed lights on viral growth and gene expression. Since predicting optimal RNA secondary structures is computationally intensive, Dr. Leung is implementing optimization techniques and parallel algorithms on an IBM p690 multiprocessor machine to improve the prediction efficiency.

There are two other projects involving similar probabilistic modeling techniques. One focuses on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) of three human genes: BLM, WRN and RQL which are candidate genes for breast cancer. The main aim of the project is to identify haplotypes that indicate high risks of disease. Another project addresses the load balancing problem in distributed systems.  An algorithm to optimally assign a stream of single class jobs to different processors with different processing rates has been derived using a cooperative game approach (Grosu et al. 2002). They are extending this algorithm to a fault tolerant distributed system where some processors have a positive probability of failing to complete an assigned job.

In 2003, Dr. Leung joined UTEP after 14 years on the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). She has been NSF research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (1993), Visiting Associate Professor at Rice University (2001-2002), Visiting Member and Co-Chair of the “Statistical Methods in Microarray Analysis” program, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS, 2003-2004), and Professor Y.C. Wong Visiting Lecturer, University of Hong Kong (2004). In collaboration with colleagues at NUS and UTSA, Dr. Leung worked on palindrome distribution in the genomes of SARS and other coronaviruses. The findings are being reported through invited talks at INFORMS Conference in Atlanta (October 2003), Trinity University (February 2004), the International Conference on Analysis of Genomic Data at Harvard Medical School (May 2004), and the University of Hong Kong (June 2004). In addition, Dr. Leung has also provided statistical consultation for neuroscience and bioengineering projects at UTSA and UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.