John H. Reif (born 1951) is an American academic, and Professor of Computer Science at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

, who has made contributions to large number of fields in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

: ranging from

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for per ...

and

computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and explores the relationships between these classifications. A computational problem ...

robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

. He has also published in many other scientific fields including

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

(in particular,

nanoscience Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). At this scale, commonly known as the nanoscale, surface area and quantum mechanical effects become important in describing propertie ...

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of optical instruments, instruments that use or Photodetector, detect it. Optics usually describes t ...

(in particular

optical computing Optical computing or photonic computing uses light waves produced by lasers or incoherent sources for data processing, data storage or data communication for computing. For decades, photons have shown promise to enable a higher bandwidth than the ...

and design of

head-mounted displays A head-mounted display (HMD) is a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet (see helmet-mounted display for aviation applications), that has a small display optic in front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye ( binocular HMD). HMD ...

), and

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

(in particular

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

and

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed ...

Biography

John Reif received a B.S. (magna cum laude) from Tufts University in 1973, a M.S. from Harvard University in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977. From 1983 to 1986 he was associate professor of Harvard University, and since 1986 he has been Professor of Computer Science at

. Currently he holds the Hollis Edens Distinguished Professor, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences,

. From 2011 to 2014 he was Distinguished Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology (FCIT), King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has also contributed to bringing together various disjoint research communities working in different areas of nano-sciences by organizing (as General Chairman) annual Conferences on "Foundations of Nanoscience: Self-assembled architectures and devices" (FNANO) for last 20 years. He has been awarded Fellow of the following organizations:

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

ACM ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * IATA airport code for Arica Airport in Amazonas Department, Colombia Computing ...

, and the Institute of Combinatorics. He is the son of Arnold E. Reif and like him he has dual citizenship in

USA The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

and

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

Research contributions

John Reif has made contributions to large number of fields in

: ranging from

and

and to

. He developed efficient

randomized algorithms A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses Uniform distribution (discrete), uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the ...

and

parallel algorithms In computer science, a parallel algorithm, as opposed to a traditional serial algorithm, is an algorithm which can do multiple operations in a given time. It has been a tradition of computer science to describe serial algorithms in abstract machi ...

for a wide variety of

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discret ...

geometric Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

, numeric, algebraic, and logical problems. Hi
Google Scholar H-index
is 76. In the area of robotics, he gave the first hardness proofs for robotic motion planning as well as efficient algorithms for a wide variety of motion planning problems. He also has led applied research projects: parallel programming languages (Proteus System for parallel programming), parallel architectures (Blitzen, a massively parallel machine), data compression (massively parallel loss-less compression hardware), and

(free-space holographic routing). His papers on these topics can be downloade
here
John Reif is President of Eagle Eye Research, Inc., which specializes in defense applications of DNA biotechnology. He is co-founder of the company
Domus Diagnostics, Inc.
which developed a highly accurate and affordable at-home molecular testing platform for various diseases, including COVID-19, RSV, and influenza A and B.

Research in nanoscience

More recently, he has centered his research in

and in particular

DNA nanotechnology DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. In this field, nucleic acids are used as non-biological engineering materials for nanotechnology rather than as the carriers of genet ...

DNA computing DNA computing is an emerging branch of unconventional computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional electronic computing. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, a ...

, and DNA

nanorobotics Nanoid robotics, or for short, nanorobotics or nanobotics, is an emerging technology field creating machines or robots, which are called nanorobots or simply nanobots, whose components are at or near the scale of a nanometer (10−9 meters). ...

. In the last dozen years his group at Duke has designed and experimentally demonstrated in the lab a variety of novel self-assembled DNA nanostructures and DNA lattices, including the first experimental demonstrations of molecular scale computation and patterning using DNA assembly. His group also experimentally demonstrated various molecular robotic devices composed of DNA, including one of the first autonomous unidirectional DNA walker that walked on a DNA track. He also has done significant work on controlling errors in self-assembly and the stochastic analysis of self-assembly.

Publications

He is the author of over 200 publications.Publications:
Reif's publications organized by research area

Reif's publications listed on Google Scholar Website
/ref> A selection: * 2003. Hao Yan, Thomas H. LaBean, Liping Feng, and John H. Reif
Directed Nucleation Assembly of Barcode Patterned DNA Lattices
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 100, No. 14, pp. 8103–8108 (July 8, 2003). * 2004. Peng Yin, Hao Yan, Xiaoju G. Daniel, Andrew J. Turberfield, John H. Reif
A Unidirectional DNA Walker Moving Autonomously Along a Linear Track
Angewandte Chemie, Volume 43, Number 37, pp. 4906–4911 (Sept. 20, 2004). * 2007. John H. Reif and Thomas H. LaBean
Autonomous Programmable Biomolecular Devices Using Self-Assembled DNA Nanostructures
Communications of the ACM, Volume 50, Issue 9, pp. 46–53 (Sept 2007). * 2008. Peng Yin, Rizal F. Hariadi, Sudheer Sahu, Harry M.T. Choi, Sung Ha Park, Thomas H. LaBean, John H. Reif
Programming DNA Tube Circumferences
Science, Vol. 321. no. 5890, pp. 824–826, (August 8, 2008). * 2022. Daniel Fu, Raghu Pradeep Narayanan, Abhay Prasad, Fei Zhang, Dewight Williams, John S. Schreck, Hao Yan, John Reif
Automated Design of 3D DNA Origami with Non-Rasterized 2D Curvature
Science Advances, Volume 8, Issue 51, (2022).

Books

*'' Parallel Algorithm Derivation and Program Transformation'', (with Robert Paige and Ralph Wachter), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA 1993. *'' Handbook of Randomized Computing'', (with Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Panos M. Pardalos and José Rolim), Springer, New York, NY, 2001. *''Synthesis of Parallel Algorithms'', Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1993. *'' DNA-based Self-assembly and Nanorobotics'', (with S. Sahu), VDM Verlag, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2008.

References

External links

Reif's Personal Web page

Reif's Duke Web page

Reif's Family, Schooling, Work and Play
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reif, John 1951 births Duke University faculty Harvard University alumni Harvard University faculty Living people Researchers in geometric algorithms American theoretical computer scientists Tufts University alumni Tufts University School of Engineering alumni Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1997 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the IEEE DNA nanotechnology people