Research Interests:

• DNA Computing
• Formal Language Theory
• Computational Complexity
• Coding Theory
• Bio-informatics

I was born and raised in Riga , Latvia. Riga becomes a 800 years old city in 2001. While in Riga, I was mostly playing piano and studying music. I certainly was not thinking about computer science back then. Things have change since I came to Canada in 1993. From 1995 to 2000 I was a student at the University of Waterloo It was a coop program (alternated school terms and work terms) and that’s why it took 5 years. My degree was B. Math. On the left is a picture of the math building in which I have spent many countless hours. I graduated in April of 2000 and after a brief interlude at IBM, where I worked in compiler optimization team, I went back to school to pursue a doctorate degree in computer science at UWO. My supervisor is Prof. Lila Kari, one of the leading researches in DNA computing. I love studying with her. My work is in DNA computing.

My main research interest is in the area of DNA computing, which is the pursuit of finding strategies to use DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) for performing general-purpose computations. Finding optimum methods for storing data in DNA is a fundamental task that has to be accomplished in order to facilitate DNA computing. Studying the mathematical properties of languages used for encoding data is the topic of my current thesis in progress. The DNA strands used for computation need to have certain characteristics in order to avoid data loss and erroneous results. One source of problems comes from DNA code words attaching (also called annealing) to each other in unexpected ways and as a result making them unsuitable for computation. It is therefore advantageous to have code words such that the corresponding DNA strands do not bind to each other in undesirable ways. Languages that have this property are studied from the point of view of formal language theory. A hierarchy of related non-annealing languages emerges as a result. Studying the non-annealing languages has several applications. One of them is to design codes possessing the same properties and which can therefore minimize errors in computation. Another application is in the study of gene sets of various organisms. Knowing which properties of non-annealing languages characterize the set of genes of an organism contributes to our understanding of its genome and allows us to make qualitative comparisons of different organisms based on their genomic material.

• Rob Kitto (former student of Lila)
• Myself
• Prof. Lila Kari
• Geoff Wozniak (current Lila’s student)