Jason Wang, PhD, professor of Bioinformatics, Information Technology and Computer Science and director of the university's Data and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, is working on an unusual project: creating a search engine to simplify—by analysis and classification—huge amounts of biological data. With support from the National Science Foundation, Wang’s team, which includes researchers from the National Cancer Institute and Harvard University, is developing and testing a search tool for processing queries about information patterns in large databases. The search tool would facilitate drug design, protein evaluation and the classification of DNA sequences.

Wang cowrote the book Mining the World Wide Web: An Information Search Approach (2001, Kluwer Academic), which was translated to Japanese in 2004, and is an editor and author of three books: Pattern Discovery in Biomolecular Data: Tools, Techniques and Applications (1999, Oxford University Press); Computational Biology and Genome Informatics (2003, World Scientific); and Data Mining in Bioinformatics (2005, Springer).

He received both his PhD and his MS from New York University and his BS from National Taiwan University.