Nick
Superfund Research Program
When it comes to telling fellow students "How I Spent My Summer," Sinnott-Armstrong, above, is sure to have one of the most interesting stories around. (Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College)
Nick Sinnott-Armstrong, a high-school student who completed a summer research project in the Dartmouth College Superfund Research Program (SRP), took first prize for his work in a programming contest at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), held July 8–12 in Montreal.
Sinnott-Armstrong worked with Casey Green and Jason Moore, Ph.D., of the NIEHS-supported Integrative Biology Core (IBC)
at Dartmouth to analyze and present epidemiological data using computer technology normally found in 3-D video games. He is the first author on a newly published paper
reporting on the application in health research.
An advanced Graphical Processing Unit, or GPU, runs an adaptation of another Dartmouth innovation — a machine learning algorithm called Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR)
. MDR was built to detect and characterize interactions among various attributes to determine predictors of a particular outcome. It has been practically applied to the analysis of gene-environment interactions in genome-wide association studies.
The technology developed by the Core directly supports research efforts within the Dartmouth SRP. "The... GPU... reduces computational time by nearly 150-fold, compared to traditional computational methods," said Moore
