John Reif

For the Oklahoma Supreme Court justice, see John F. Reif.

John H. Reif (born 1951 in the US) is an American academic, and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University, who has made contributions to a number of fields in science and technology: ranging from computer science, chemistry, physics and mathematics.

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 1979 to 1986 he was associate professor of Harvard University and from 1983 to 1986 he was associate professor of Harvard University. Since 1986 he has been Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. Currently he holds the Hollis Edens Distinguished Professor, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University. From 2011 to 2014 he was also Distinguished Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology (FCIT), King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

John Reif is President of Eagle Eye Research, Inc., which specializes in defense applications of DNA biotechnology. 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 15 years.

He has been awarded Fellow of the following organizations: American Association for the Advancement of Science, [[Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]]], ACM, and the [[Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications[ICA]]].

He is the son of Arnold E. Reif, an Austrian that emigrated to the US. In 2023 John Reif was granted Austrian citizenship, in addition to his US citizenship.

Research contributions

John Reif has made contributions to large number of fields in computer science: ranging from algorithms and computational complexity theory to robotics and to game theory. He developed efficient randomized algorithms and parallel algorithms for a wide variety of graph, geometric, numeric, algebraic, and logical problems. His Google Scholar H-index is 68.

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 optical computing (free-space holographic routing). His papers on these algorithmic topics can be downloaded here.

Research in nanoscience

More recently, he has centered his research in nanoscience and in particular DNA nanotechnology, DNA computing, and DNA nanorobotics. 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.

See also

• Kinodynamic planning

Publications

He is the author of over 200 publications. 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).

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.

External links

• Reif's Personal Web page
• Reif's Duke Web page
• Reif's Family, Schooling, Work and Play