Dr. Clote has an unusual background, having held faculty positions in Mathematics, Computer Science and Biology in France, Germany and the United States, including the tenured Gentzen Computer Science Chair in Munich, and a visiting Digiteo Chair of Excellence at Ecole Polytechnique. This unique experience, including biochemistry lab work as an undergraduate, provides for an interest and familiarity with the mathematical, algorithmic and physical chemical issues that concern the research in computational biology – especially RNA and protein structural bioinformatics. Some recent computational research of Dr. Clote and co-workers:

• Algorithm using the fast Fourier transform to compute 1D and 2D projections of RNA energy landscapes with applications to conformational switch detection and RNA kinetics.
• Algorithm to predict RNA secondary structure prediction that incorporates in-line probing and SHAPE (selective 2’hydroxyl acylation analyzed by primer extension) data.
• Algorithm for RNA inverse folding and molecular design (work of Ivan Dotu and Juan-Antonio Garcia-Martin).
• Design of synthetic hammerhead ribozymes, experimentally confirmed to be functional.
• Various additional algorithms including thermodynamic structural entropy, expected degree of the network of RNA secondary structures, etc.

Dr. Clote has co-written 2 books, co-edited 3 books, and published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, in subjects ranging from synthetic biology, riboswitch prediction using thermodynamic methods, disulfide bond topology prediction using novel neural net architecture and support vector machines, design of programming languages that capture fast parallel complexity classes, boolean circuit complexity upper bounds using classification of finite simple groups, ultraproducts, fast-growing combinatorial functions, combinatorial independence results in Peano arithmetic, etc.