Choosing bioinformatics over hoops

Troy Ruths made a choice last year to follow his heart.

He had just led his basketball team at Washington University in St. Louis to a Division III national championship and could have pursued a future playing ball overseas. But he decided his calling was in computer science.

“In the end, I was more interested in computer science than basketball… I had to stay true to myself,” he said. Ruths entered Rice as a doctoral student in bioinformatics, the burgeoning discipline that couples biology and technology to advance medicine and find answers to difficult problems facing humanity.

“There’s a whole host of problems that biologists have that computer scientists can provide the solutions for,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be here at Rice for that, especially with its proximity to the Texas Medical Center and all the collaborations under way.”

Opting for Rice classes over the hardwood really wasn’t as big a leap as it sounds for the athlete. He was equally well known for his academic successes at WU, where he achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA. Sports information officers at universities across the nation named him ESPN’s College Division Academic All-American of the Year.

That recognition helped Ruths garner a Rice Presidential Fellowship. At Rice, he added a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Fellowship to his portfolio, which pays his full tuition and fees over five years. It also provides a yearly stipend of $32,400, and includes funds for research conferences and attending an annual meeting in Washington, D.C. In addition, Ruths received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which provides three years of support to new graduate students.

Ruths said his decision to come to Rice was easy for a couple of additional reasons. First, his older brother, Derek, who received a computer science doctorate in May, had lauded the university and its computer science program (Derek has now joined McGill University as an assistant professor). Being in Houston also meant Ruths was closer to his longtime girlfriend Ivy Ikpeme, whom he married in August. The new Mrs. Ruths is pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Houston.

Ruths is a member of the Bioinformatics Research Group at Rice led by Luay Nakhleh, an assistant professor of computer science.

“When Troy arrived here, he didn’t have much computational biology in his background,” Nakhleh said of his young protégé. “But he was up to speed in no time and has already published a paper on his idea for an entirely new way of computing similarities in sets of genes. It’s evidence of his curiosity and very bright future in bioinformatics.”