Bruce Randall Donald (born 1958) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University. He has made numerous contributions to several fields in Computer Science such as robotics, Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), Geometric & physical algorithms and computational geometry; as well as in areas of Structural Molecular Biology & Biochemistry such as Protein design, Protein Structure Determination and Computational Chemistry.
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Donald received a B.A. summa cum laude in Russian Language from Yale University in 1980. After working at the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in the Harvard Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he then attended MIT EECS, where he received his S.M. in EECS (1984) and Ph.D. in Computer Science (1987) under the supervision of professor Tomás Lozano-Pérez in the MIT AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).[1]
He was an associate professor of Computer Science at Cornell University until 1998, and then was Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr 1933 Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth College until 2006 when he moved to Duke University. Currently Donald is the William and Sue Gross Professor of Computer Science, Duke University and Professor of Biochemistry, School of Medicine, Duke University Medical Center.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Fellow of the IEEE. Previously, he was a Guggenheim Fellow (2001–2002) and received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989–1994).
Bruce Donald’s early research was in the field of robotic motion planning and distributed manipulation.[2] Later he has made numerous contributions to MEMS and Micro-robotics, and designed MEMS micro-robots with dimensions of 60 µm by 250 µm by 10 µm.[3]
Recently, his research has been in the areas of Structural Molecular Biology; chiefly, Protein Design and Protein Structure Determination from NMR data. He has developed numerous algorithms for protein design which has been successfully tested experimentally in the wet lab. The protein design algorithms attempt to incorporate additional molecular flexibility into the design process by using ensembles and continuously-flexible rotamers and backbones. His algorithm to identify cross-rotation peaks consistent with non-crystallographic symmetry has been used in the structure determination of the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase-thymidylate synthase (DHFR-TS) from Cryptosporidium hominis, an important advancement in Cryptosporidium biology. He has designed many algorithms and computational protocols to extract structural information from NMR data, and use that information to compute structures of globular proteins and symmetric homo-oligomers. A distinct feature of his algorithms is that they use less data, and provide complexity-theoretic guarantees on time and space.
Donald has supervised many students and postdocs, many of whom are now professors in reputed universities such as MIT, CMU, University of Washington, Seattle, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College and University of Toronto; and some are researchers in prestigious research organizations viz. NIAID, NIST, IBM, Sandia National Laboratories.[4]
Donald is the author of over 100 publications. A representative selection: