Named one of America’s ‘Best 300 Professors’ in 2012 by Princeton Review

Dr. Yosi Shibberu is one of the architects of Rose-Hulman's Data Science program jointly administered by the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments. An esteemed educator, Dr. Shibberu was featured in the Princeton Review's Best 300 Professors in America book, has received the Dean's Outstanding Teacher Award, and was formerly the Endowed Faculty Chair of Innovation in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. His classes focus heavily on problem-solving, rather than lecturing, in order to adapt to each student's learning style. Dr. Shibberu also is an accomplished researcher. He received a Fulbright fellowship that allowed him to spend a year in his native land of Ethiopia to conduct research at Jimma University to help combat the country's devastating malaria problem, using math to discover the mosquito genes linked to carrying malaria. He developed and teaches one of the required courses in the new Biomathematics program, BMTH 312 Bioinformatics, and with fellow math professor Dr. Allen Holder, developed the fastest algorithm at the time for protein analysis, enabling researchers to do in minutes what had previously taken days. 

Academic Degrees

  • PhD, University of Texas at Arlington, 1992
  • MS, University of Texas at Arlington, 1990
  • MS, University of Texas at Arlington, 1986
  • BS, Swarthmore College, 1983

Awards & Honors

  • Endowed Faculty Chair, Innovation in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Fulbright Scholar, Jimma University, Ethiopia, 2014
  • Outstanding Teacher Award, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2013
  • Best 300 Professors, Princeton Review, 2012
  • Martin Luther King Award, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2012

Publications & Presentations

  • Brandt, M., Holder, A., and Shibberu, Y., “Fundamentals of Protein Structure Alignment,” Invited Book Chapter, Wiley Series on Bioinformatics: Algorithmic and Artificial Intelligence Methods for Protein Bioinformatics, 2014
  • Holder, A., Simon, J., Strauser, J., and Shibberu, Y., “Dynamic Programming Used to Align Protein Structures with a Spectrum is Robust,” Biology, 2, No. 4, 1296-1310, 2013
  • Shibberu, Y. and Holder, A., “A Spectral Approach to Protein Structure Alignment,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 8, No. 4, 867-875, 2011
  • Shibberu, Y., Brandt, M., and Cooper, D., “Intrinsic Contact Geometry of Protein Dynamics,” Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, 2010
  • Shibberu, Y., Holder, A., and Lutz, K., “Fast Protein Structure Alignment,” ISBRA, LNCS (LNBI), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 6053, 152-165, 2010

Research Interests

  • Applications of deep learning
  • Estrogen receptor protein dynamics
  • Protein structure bioinformatics
  • Numerical methods for Hamiltonian dynamical systems
  • Scientific computation
  • Dynamics and control theory

Teaching Interests

  • Data Mining
  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Bioinformatics
  • Hidden Markov modeling
Launch Root Quad