“Those who dance are often seen as mad
by those who cannot hear the music.”
I am a theorist and computational scientist working on fundamental problems in systems biology at Harvard Medical School.
What is systems biology? The field of systems biology emerged in response to the swelling bounty of high-throughput data about molecular aspects of cell biology. These data intensified the need for understanding how coherent system behavior arises (or is lost) from a staggering diversity of molecular assemblies that interact with one another asynchronously and autonomously. Systems biology, thus, aims at developing and integrating new experimental and mathematical techniques in the pursuit of principles that would make the nature of cellular phenotypes more intelligible and their control more deliberate. This pursuit is driven by the practical need to cure disease. However, it also reflects a want for a theoretical perspective needed to think the complexity of the cell and the organism, and, by extension, evolution itself.
I am interested in three chemistries that revolve around a common idea: The transformation of structured discrete objects by means of rules that specify the transformation of patterns contained in these objects. An archetype of this idea is captured in the "chemistry" of computation, such as expressed in Alonzo Church's 𝜆-calculus. Likewise, organic Chemistry follows specific rules of construction anchored in fundamental physics. The third chemistry is the chemistry of combinatorial state that evolved with proteins. Central to formalizing the notion of rule is the idea of graph transformation.