Research Interests

I am an Associate Professor of Mathematics at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict. My research interests are in enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. Combinatorics is the branch of mathematics which is concerned with arrangements of objects in a finite set.  Enumerative combinatorics is the study of counting such arrangements; algebraic combinatorics focuses on algebraic objects.  I am particularly interested in statistics on words (arrangements of "letters") and their distributions, since these statistics often measure or reveal something interesting about algebraic objects. My current research centers on Mahonian statistics and various analogs.

I am also interested in combinatorial biology, especially combinatorial aspects of RNA secondary structure as well as phylogenetics and graph theory. I regularly teach an Introduction to Bioinformatics, and am part of the  Undergraduate Research in Microbial Genome Annotation Project coordinated by the Joint Genomics Institute and the Department of Energy. See http://www.jgi.doe.gov/education/genomeannotation.html

Papers and Projects

"Taking the Bite (Byte?) out of Phylogenetics", BioQUEST/ASM Bioinformatics Institute, March 2006. Available at http://bioquest.org/bedrock/washingtondc_03_06/resources.php#projects

"The Puzzling Properties of the Permease", BioQUEST/ASM Bioinformatics Institute, March 2006. Available at http://bioquest.org/bedrock/washingtondc_03_06/resources.php#projects

"Mahonian Z-Statistics"  Discrete Mathematics 307 (2007) 2341-2350 (with Dennis E. White) 

"Recursive Statistics on Words", Discrete Mathematics 157 (1996) 169-191 (with Dennis E. White).