Rishi Khan, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering, has been selected as a member of the U.S. delegation to the 52nd meeting of Nobel laureates in Lindau, Germany, this summer.

Khan, whose research interests are in bioinformatics, is one of just 36 American students and 200 young researchers worldwide selected to attend the event.

"I was very pleased and very honored when I learned of my selection to the delegation," says Khan, who earned fame for his work unlocking the complex programming secrets of the "Melissa" computer virus in 1999.

He says he has two goals on the trip--to learn the opinions of the Nobel laureates and his fellow students about broad issues concerning science in general and to make connections with other students in his field for possible collaborative work.

"I am interested in what the Nobel laureates and the other researchers attending the conference think about the future of science and where it will be going in the next 50 years," Khan says.

Besides opening his mind to a broad range of opinions and developing a network of young researchers, Khan says he also is interested in simply being a tourist. "This is the first time I will have been outside North America, and I really want to see what Germany is like," he says.

A computer engineer by training, Khan has been splitting his time between the Delaware campus and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, a UD partner institution. There, he is delving more deeply into biology to gain a well-rounded understanding that he can apply to the field of bioinformatics by having the ability to collect his own data.

Large amounts of quantitative data are important in systems analysis, and few biologists are willing to meticulously collect such data, Khan says.

"Most biological questions are of the form, 'Is it there or not?' or 'Is it up or down?'" he adds. "I want to ask questions on the scale of, 'How do all of the pieces of the system interact?' For those kinds of questions, you have to collect your own data."

Khan is interested in modeling at the cellular level and, specifically, in modeling high blood pressure in rats.

He says he is very grateful to the support shown by Guang Gao, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and by that department, the College and the University administration. "I really want to thank everyone for their assistance in the process of applying for this honor," he says.

Young researchers selected to attend the meeting of the Nobel laureates are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, a university consortium that administers the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

Khan is among the 26 students sponsored by the energy department. Other universities represented in that contingent include the California Institute of Technology, Yale, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania State and Northwestern universities and the universities of California-Berkeley, Chicago and Pennsylvania.

--Neil Thomas, AS '76