Degrees

Ph.D., M.S., University of New Hampshire
B.A., University of Maine

Main Interests

Designing computational stylistic experiments in novel domains including Anglo-Saxon literature and DNA.

Empowering biology faculty and students to learn to solve problems in sequence analysis by programming. Perl for Exploring DNA. (2007, Oxford University Press).

Research Interests

Our Lexomics group, an interdisciplinary research team from faculty and students in Computer Science, English, and Statistics has followed up our NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant with another $178,000 award (NEH PR-50112011) entitled: "Lexomic Tools and Methods for Textual Analysis: Providing Deep Access to Digitized Texts (2011-2013).

The Genomics Group is an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students studying the DNA of various organisms, including work in genomic signatures and comparative genomics. Working in conjunction with faculty in biology and statistics who are involved in the Bioinformatics major, students and faculty are currently applying algorithms to detect the horizontal transfer of chunks of DNA from one organism to another or on the hunt for novel sRNAs.

Teaching Interests

Interdisciplinary Teaching in Genomics
CS and Biology -- "Linking" courses, team-teaching
DNA -- Teaching sequence analysis in Perl

New Courses
Storytelling Through Computer Animation
Discrete I for Computer Science
Computing for Poets -- RegEx, Perl, Anglo-Saxon Corpus, and Tolkien

Other Interests

Camp in Maine.
Building field stone walls.
Bird watching ... landscaping.

Reading biographies of each President in order (I'm plodding through Dallek's Nixon and Kissenger).

China (April 2012):  The Great Wall  |  The Forbidden City  |  Terra Cotta Warriors | Peking Duck Dinner

Israel (January 2013)

A year "down undah" ...

 

Publications

Book

LeBlanc, M.D. and Dyer, B.D. (2007). Perl for Exploring DNA. (Oxford University Press).

Articles

Downey, S.J., Drout, M.D.C., Kahn, M., and LeBlanc, M.D. (2012). 'Books Tell Us:' Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A. Modern Philology. 110 (2012): 1-29..

Drout, M.D.C., M. J. Kahn, M.D. LeBlanc, and Nelson, C. '11 (2011). Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July 2011, 301-336.

Drout, M., Kahn, M., LeBlanc, M.D., Jones, A. '11, Kathok, N. '10, and Nelson, C. '11 (2010). Lexomics for Anglo-Saxon Literature. Old English Newsletter.

Maloney, M., Parker, J., LeBlanc, M.D., Woodard, C.T., Glackin, M., and Hanrahan, M. (2010). Bioinformatics and the Undergraduate Curriculum. CBE Life Sci Educ: 172-174.

LeBlanc, M.D., Gousie, M. and Armstrong, T. (March 2010). Connecting Across Campus. Proceedings of the 41st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Milwaukee, WI.

Dyer, B.D., Kahn, M.J., and LeBlanc, M.D. (2007). Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analyses of genomic signatures reveal sets of tetramers that discriminate temperature optima of Archaea and Bacteria. Archaea 2:159-167.

LeBlanc, M.D. and Leibowitz, R. (2006). Discrete Partnership -- A case for a full-year of Discrete Math. Proceedings of 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Houston, TX, 313-317.

LeBlanc, M.D. and Dyer, B.D. (2004). Bioinformatics and Computing Curricula 2001 -- Why Computer Science is well positioned in a post-genomic world. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v36(4), Dec. 2004, 64-67.

Russell, S.W. and LeBlanc, M. (2004). Learning By Seeing By Doing: Arithmetic Word Problems. With Sylvia Weber-Russell (UNH). The Journal of the Learning Sciences, v13(2), 197-220.

Dyer, B.D., LeBlanc, M.D., Benz, S., Cahalan, P., Donorfio, B., Sagui, P.,
Villa, A., and Williams, G. (2004). A DNA motif lexicon: cataloguing and annotating sequences. In Silico Biology, v4, 0039. http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/2004/04/0039/

Grants and Workshops

Recent Grants

Drout, M. (PI), Kahn, M. (Co-PI), and LeBlanc, M.D. (Co-PI) [April 01, 2011 – March 30, 2013]. National Endowment for the Humanities – NEH PR-50112011 -- Lexomic Tools and Methods for Textual Analysis: Providing Deep Access to Digitized Texts. [ $178,000 award].

LeBlanc, M. (PI), Drout, M. and Kahn, M. (July 2008 - June 2010). National Endowment for the Humanities NEH HD-50300-08 -- Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond.

LeBlanc, M. and Dyer B. (May 2004 - May 2007). Two-year NSF grant: DUE-0340761 Teaching Genomics to Undergraduate Computer Science and Biology Majors: A model involving infusion and strategic linking. See Sample Educational Materials.

Recent Workshops and Talks

Classifying Stages of Retention and Loss of DNA Acquired by Horizontal Transfer between Bacteria and Archaea. Experimental work performed in conjunction with Emily Baldwin ‘13, Kelsey Hichens ‘13, Michael Kahn, and Betsey D. Dyer. Abstract published in the proceedings of and work presented at World DNA Day, Xi’an, China, April 26, 2012.

Lexomics Methods – Presented at The 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10, 2012.

Perl for Biologists. Howard Hughes funded workshop for retaining students in science. Hampton College, VA. July 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Computer Science @Home: Programming with Alice Animation. Presented at the Massachusetts Home School Convention. Worcester, MA, April 30, 2011.

Bioinformatics in the computer science curriculum. Panel presentation at CCSCNE 2011 -- Conference for Computing in Small Colleges. Western New England College, Springfield, MA, April 16, 2011.

Recruiting via a First-Year Seminar: Storytelling Through Computer Animation. Presented at SIGCSE 2011 -- The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Dallas, TX, March 11, 2011.

Connecting Across Campus. Presented at SIGCSE 2010 -- The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Milwaukee, WI, March 11, 2010.

Computing for Poets. Presented at SIGCSE 2010 -- The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Milwaukee, WI, March 12, 2010.

medPing: Data Structures with Embedded Medical Devices. Presented at CCSCNE 2010 -- Conference for Computing in Small Colleges. Hartford, CT, April 16, 2010.

Computer Science @Home: Programming with Alice Animation. Presented at the Massachusetts Home School Convention. Worcester, MA, April 24, 2010.

Fishing for patterns in a sea of texts: Lexomics for Anglo-Saxon Literature. Presented at the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (with M. Drout, M. Kahn, and C. Nelson '11) at St. John, Newfoundland, Canada, July 25, 2009.

Palindromes in DNA Land. Presented at 'DNA and Health: Education, Community and Business Perspectives' (with B. Dyer) at the Center for the Advancement of Science Exploration, Bridgewater State College, February 5, 2009.

Alice in High School Land. Presented a hands-on introduction to the Alice programming environment to computing and mathematics teachers at Norton Public High School, Norton, MA, February 1, 2009.

Extremophiles and Spider Webs: Adventures in Genomics. Presented at 'Bringing Big Science to Small Schools: Genomics Curriculum Development Workshop' (with B. Dyer) at Vassar College, July 22, 2007.

Student Work

Recent Student Publications

Kelsey Hichens ’13 and Emily Baldwin ’13. The Double Helix of Computer Science and Biology: Horizontal Transfer in Archaea and Bacteria Genomes. Poster presentation at the Northeastern Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSCNE 2012), Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT, April 27, 2012.

Jones, Amos ’11. diviText: Graphical and Automated Text Segmentation for Text Mining. Poster presentation at the Northeastern Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Western New England College, April 15, 2011.

Drout, M.D.C., M. J. Kahn, M.D. LeBlanc, and Nelson, C. '11. Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July 2011, 301-336.

Drout, M., Kahn, M., LeBlanc, M.D., Jones, A. '11, Kathok, N. '10, and Nelson, C. '11 (2010). Lexomics for Anglo-Saxon Literature. Old English Newsletter.

Benz, Steve '05, Grossman, Robbie '07, Dyer, B., and LeBlanc, M. (2004). Genomics Research and the Liberal Arts: Building a Database for Exploring Your Favorite Set of Genes (favGene v2.0).Transformations-Liberal Arts in the Digital Age, v2(1), May 2004.

Benz, Steve '05 and Cool, Jonah '04 (2003). Using Regular Expressions to Locate Putative Zinc Finger Binding Sites. Abstract appears in The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, v18(4).

Villa, Adam '03 (2003). Giving DNA a Trie. Abstract appears in The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, v18(4).

Student Software for Anglo-Saxon Scholarship
Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond.

Student Software in Genomics
Building tools for scientists ...

Honors Theses

Cluster Validation Using the Non-parametric Bootstrap and Parallel Processing: Applications in Unsupervised Machine Learning of Shimodaira's Method to Text Mining and Genomics. Donald Bass, May 2012. Co-advisor with Mike Kahn, Statistics.

diviText: Visualizing Text Segmentation for Text Mining.  Amos Jones '11.

The Politics of Free: Open Source Software in Government.  Brian Donorfio '04

Supporting Analyses of Gene Regulation in DNA Neighborhoods.  Adam Villa '03

Search Algorithms for Locating Potential Regulatory Motifs in the Promotors of the Kreb's Cycle Genes of Caenorhabditis elegans.
Glen Aspeslagh '00

Utilizing a Genetic Algorithm to Search the Structure-space of Artificial Neural Networks for Optimal Architectures.
Ken Aspeslagh '00

Service Learning
New database for information on 5000+ slides.
Norton Historical Society web page
Town of Norton prototype