Visit of Professor Brendan Mumey - Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies Awardee 2019-2020

University of Helsinki was honored to host the visit of Professor Brendan Mumey and his family during Spring 2020 through the Fulbright program. Professor Mumey works at the Gianforte School of Computing of the Montana State University, USA. His visit was hosted by Professor Veli Mäkinen from the Algorithmic Bioinformatics research group.

During the visit, Professor Mumey organized a seminar on Algorithmic Topics in Computational Biology, and established new collaborations resulting in a study on the parameterized complexity of the minimum path cover (MPC) problem in directed acyclic graphs, efficient algorithms to find “safe” paths that are conserved among all optimal MPC solutions, and some recent work on flow decomposition with subpath constraints; all of this work has application to biological sequence assembly.

As the coronavirus situation worsened in March 2020, Professor Mumey and his family returned to the USA. However, the ongoing collaborations continued smoothly with remote connections.