FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Robert N. Braswell, Ph.D., P.E., P.L.E.
Florida A&M University and Florida State University
2525 Pottsdamer Street
Tallahassee FL 32310-6046
July 1, 2013
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
RE: U.S. Permanent Residency Petition for Dr. Xugang Ye
To Whom It May Concern:
It is with great pleasure that I write a letter on behalf of Dr.Xugang Ye recommending that his application for a permanent U.S. visa be approved so that he may remain in the United States and continue the remarkable research he has undertaken.
I am Professor Emeritus of Engineering at The Florida State University. My professional career spanned over 60 years during which I was awarded more than two hundred honors and citations in design, teaching and community service. I am also a retired member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service (SES) in the Department of Defense, and a combat veteran of the Korean War. <
I knew Dr. Ye when I served as a member of his Master thesis supervisory committee. Based on my personal knowledge and experience in his fields of study, I feel that I am well qualified to evaluate Dr. Ye’s critical contributions to the scientific community, and to the nation as a whole. I have thoroughly reviewed his publications and research findings. I have complete confidence in his unique skills, talents and scientific potential.
Dr. Ye’s expertise lies in mathematical modeling, computing and optimization. He conducted early research on the optimization of composite manufacturing processes critical to the development of aircraft, ships and weapons for national defense. He has published in Journal of Manufacturing Systems and the Journal of Transport in Porous Media some significant technological findings resulting from the simulation of processes and the optimization of system parameters. In his Ph.D. dissertation research, Dr. Yedeveloped new disambiguation protocol and integrated it into the dynamic A* algorithm for minefield path planning. He conceived, formulated and demonstrated a sensor information monotonicity framework, which is very useful for the decision-making of sensor deployment. He has breakthrough papers that were published in Journal of Operational Research Society, Journal of Naval Research Logisticsand the International Journal of Operations Research & Informational Systems. Dr. Ye will continue to make valuable science and engineering contributions welfare and progress of the United States.
After Dr. Ye finished his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University, he joined National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) continuing on research work. His focus shifted to the statistical analysis of the large protein data, and his work already has important implications for the field of bioinformatics. Although this field was new to him, he made contributions very quickly. Dr. Ye has papers published or accepted in the prestigious Journal of Computational Biology and Journal of Bioinformatics, which combine mathematics, computer science, and biology. His work emphasizes machine-learning approaches to the pattern recognition of protein structures. Nowadays, both biologists and medical researchers more and more rely on software for the observation and discovery of biological phenomena. Andthe software is the results of the endeavors of mathematicians, statisticians and computer engineers. As an applied mathematician, Dr. Ye developed an inference algorithm for deriving the Dirichlet mixture prior from the gold-standard multiple sequence alignment data. He also developed a real-time Dirichlet mixture adjustment algorithm to deal with target data sets. Based on the Dirichlet mixture model, he designed new Bayesian scoring function and pattern search algorithmsfor identifying important, functional protein domains.Dr. Ye’s results will lead to a new generation of software and certainly bring benefits to biologists and medical researchers all over the world.
So, as I have noted above, Dr. Ye is a versatile applied mathematician and engineer, and his work is highly innovative and important. As such, his loss to the scientific research community of the United States cannot be tolerated. He possesses those attributes of perseverance, fortitude, resourcefulness and integrity that we seek in our nation’s scientific community. I strongly support the petition on his behalf for an immigrant visa in the United States based on his demonstrated recognition as an outstanding researcher.
Respectfully submitted,
Certified by
/s/ Robert N. Braswell
Robert N. Braswell, Ph.D., P.E., P.L.E.
Engineering Professor Emeritus
SES Retired, U.S. DOD
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