Andy Brass

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Andy Brass
Andy Brass P1010738 (13870383443).jpg
Born
Andrew M. Brass

Alma mater University of Edinburgh
Scientific career
Fields Bioinformatics
Institutions
Thesis Molecular dynamics simulations of fluorite structure crystals  (1987)
Website manchester.ac.uk/research/andy.brass

Andrew M. Brass is a Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Life Sciences. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Education

Brass was educated at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his PhD on Solid-state physics in 1987. [6]

Research

Following his PhD, Brass worked at McMaster University [7] [8] in Canada on a NATO fellowship to study aspects of high-temperature superconductivity and strongly coupled electron systems. In 1990 he moved to the University of Manchester [9] [10] to become a founding member of the bioinformatics group, where he has a wide range of projects in protein function prediction, gene expression analysis, intelligent integration, [11] automated curation, [12] and bioinformatics education. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superconductivity</span> Electrical conductivity with exactly zero resistance

Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.

Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which does not conform to conventional BCS theory or its extensions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-temperature superconductivity</span> Superconductive behavior at temperatures much higher than absolute zero

High-temperature superconductors are defined as materials with critical temperature above 77 K, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures, close to absolute zero. The "high temperatures" are still far below ambient, and therefore require cooling. The first break through of high-temperature superconductor was discovered in 1986 by IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. Although the critical temperature is around 35.1 K, this new type of superconductor was readily modified by Ching-Wu Chu to make the first high-temperature superconductor with critical temperature 93 K. Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". Most high-Tc materials are type-II superconductors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel C. C. Ting</span> Nobel prize winning physicist

Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle.

In the study of complex networks, assortative mixing, or assortativity, is a bias in favor of connections between network nodes with similar characteristics. In the specific case of social networks, assortative mixing is also known as homophily. The rarer disassortative mixing is a bias in favor of connections between dissimilar nodes.

In superconductivity, a semifluxon is a half integer vortex of supercurrent carrying the magnetic flux equal to the half of the magnetic flux quantum Φ0. Semifluxons exist in the 0-π long Josephson junctions at the boundary between 0 and π regions. This 0-π boundary creates a π discontinuity of the Josephson phase. The junction reacts to this discontinuity by creating a semifluxon. Vortex's supercurrent circulates around 0-π boundary. In addition to semifluxon, there exist also an antisemifluxon. It carries the flux −Φ0/2 and its supercurrent circulates in the opposite direction.

In superconductivity, a Josephson vortex is a quantum vortex of supercurrents in a Josephson junction. The supercurrents circulate around the vortex center which is situated inside the Josephson barrier, unlike Abrikosov vortices in type-II superconductors, which are located in the superconducting condensate.

A Josephson junction (JJ) is a quantum mechanical device which is made of two superconducting electrodes separated by a barrier. A π Josephson junction is a Josephson junction in which the Josephson phase φ equals π in the ground state, i.e. when no external current or magnetic field is applied.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Stevens (scientist)</span>

Robert David Stevens is a professor of bio-health informatics. and former Head of Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester

A charge density wave (CDW) is an ordered quantum fluid of electrons in a linear chain compound or layered crystal. The electrons within a CDW form a standing wave pattern and sometimes collectively carry an electric current. The electrons in such a CDW, like those in a superconductor, can flow through a linear chain compound en masse, in a highly correlated fashion. Unlike a superconductor, however, the electric CDW current often flows in a jerky fashion, much like water dripping from a faucet due to its electrostatic properties. In a CDW, the combined effects of pinning and electrostatic interactions likely play critical roles in the CDW current's jerky behavior, as discussed in sections 4 & 5 below.

Quantum dimer models were introduced to model the physics of resonating valence bond (RVB) states in lattice spin systems. The only degrees of freedom retained from the motivating spin systems are the valence bonds, represented as dimers which live on the lattice bonds. In typical dimer models, the dimers do not overlap.

In a standard superconductor, described by a complex field fermionic condensate wave function, vortices carry quantized magnetic fields because the condensate wave function is invariant to increments of the phase by . There a winding of the phase by creates a vortex which carries one flux quantum. See quantum vortex.

Ferromagnetic superconductors are materials that display intrinsic coexistence of ferromagnetism and superconductivity. They include UGe2, URhGe, and UCoGe. Evidence of ferromagnetic superconductivity was also reported for ZrZn2 in 2001, but later reports question these findings. These materials exhibit superconductivity in proximity to a magnetic quantum critical point.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Callaway</span>

David James Edward Callaway is a biological nanophysicist in the New York University School of Medicine, where he is professor and laboratory director. He was trained as a theoretical physicist by Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Cosmas Zachos, and was previously an associate professor at the Rockefeller University after positions at CERN and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Callaway's laboratory discovered potential therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease based upon apomorphine after an earlier paper of his developed models of Alzheimer amyloid formation. He has also initiated the study of protein domain dynamics by neutron spin echo spectroscopy, providing a way to observe protein nanomachines in motion.

A Peierls transition or Peierls distortion is a distortion of the periodic lattice of a one-dimensional crystal. Atomic positions oscillate, so that the perfect order of the 1-D crystal is broken.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">122 iron arsenide</span>

The 122 iron arsenide unconventional superconductors are part of a new class of iron-based superconductors. They form in the tetragonal I4/mmm, ThCr2Si2 type, crystal structure. The shorthand name "122" comes from their stoichiometry; the 122s have the chemical formula AEFe2Pn2, where AE stands for alkaline earth metal (Ca, Ba Sr or Eu) and Pn is pnictide (As, P, etc.). These materials become superconducting under pressure and also upon doping. The maximum superconducting transition temperature found to date is 38 K in the Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2. The microscopic description of superconductivity in the 122s is yet unclear.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subir Sachdev</span> Indian physicist

Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017–2019.

A φ Josephson junction is a particular type of the Josephson junction, which has a non-zero Josephson phase φ across it in the ground state. A π Josephson junction, which has the minimum energy corresponding to the phase of π, is a specific example of it.

Elbio Rubén Dagotto is an Argentinian-American theoretical physicist and academic. He is a distinguished professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Distinguished Scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

References

  1. Andy Brass publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  2. Andy Brass publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  3. Andy Brass at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  4. Andy Brass's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  5. Andy Brass author profile page at the ACM Digital Library OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  6. Brass, Andrew (1987). Molecular dynamics simulations of fluorite structure crystals (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  7. Jensen, H.; Brass, A.; Berlinsky, A. (1988). "Lattice deformations and plastic flow through bottlenecks in a two-dimensional model for flux pinning in type-II superconductors". Physical Review Letters. 60 (16): 1676–1679. Bibcode:1988PhRvL..60.1676J. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.60.1676. PMID   10038108.
  8. Jensen, H.; Brass, A.; Brechet, Y.; Berlinsky, A. (1988). "Current-voltage characteristics in a two-dimensional model for flux flow in type-II superconductors". Physical Review B. 38 (13): 9235–9237. Bibcode:1988PhRvB..38.9235J. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.38.9235. PMID   9945721.
  9. Scott, J. E.; Cummings, C.; Brass, A.; Chen, Y. (1991). "Secondary and tertiary structures of hyaluronan in aqueous solution, investigated by rotary shadowing-electron microscopy and computer simulation. Hyaluronan is a very efficient network-forming polymer". The Biochemical Journal. 274 (Pt 3): 699–705. doi:10.1042/bj2740699. PMC   1149968 . PMID   2012600.
  10. Tuckwell, D. S.; Brass, A.; Humphries, M. J. (1992). "Homology modelling of integrin EF-hands. Evidence for widespread use of a conserved cation-binding site". The Biochemical Journal. 285 (Pt 1): 325–331. doi:10.1042/bj2850325. PMC   1132784 . PMID   1322124.
  11. Lord, P. W.; Stevens, R. D.; Brass, A.; Goble, C. A. (2003). "Investigating semantic similarity measures across the Gene Ontology: The relationship between sequence and annotation". Bioinformatics. 19 (10): 1275–1283. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.561.1240 . doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btg153 . PMID   12835272.
  12. Taylor, C. F.; Paton, N. W.; Garwood, K. L.; Kirby, P. D.; Stead, D. A.; Yin, Z.; Deutsch, E. W.; Selway, L.; Walker, J.; Riba-Garcia, I.; Mohammed, S.; Deery, M. J.; Howard, J. A.; Dunkley, T.; Aebersold, R.; Kell, D. B.; Lilley, K. S.; Roepstorff, P.; Yates Jr, J. R.; Brass, A.; Brown, A. J. P.; Cash, P.; Gaskell, S. J.; Hubbard, S. J.; Oliver, S. G. (2003). "A systematic approach to modeling, capturing, and disseminating proteomics experimental data". Nature Biotechnology. 21 (3): 247–254. doi:10.1038/nbt0303-247. PMID   12610571. S2CID   6760924.
  13. Goble, C. A.; Stevens, R.; Ng, G.; Bechhofer, S.; Paton, N. W.; Baker, P. G.; Peim, M.; Brass, A. (2001). "Transparent access to multiple bioinformatics information sources" (PDF). IBM Systems Journal. 40 (2): 532–551. doi:10.1147/sj.402.0532.