Systems biology and biological information processing

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My research is targeted towards computational problems that arise in the study of complex, dynamic biological networks. Much of my research is motivated by "high-content" technologies, such as in vivo expression imaging or flow cytometry, in which the activities of a relatively small number of types of molecules are measured quantitatively with high spatial and/or temporal resolution in single cells or in tissues. My research focuses on three areas: (1) model formulation and fitting, particularly for spatial/temporal gene expression data, (2) experiment design, especially for time-series experiments and drug screening problems, and (3) theoretical analysis of the information processing capabilities of biomolecular systems. In the first two foci, I develop techniques that allow us to maximize the amount of information obtained from molecular biological data, and the efficiency with which that information is extracted. In the final focus, the goal is to understand how biomolecular systems themselves make decisions, or how they can be engineered (via "synthetic biology") to carry out computational tasks.