Systems Biology

Systems biology focuses on the study of the interactions between the components of a biological system, and how these interactions give rise to the function and behavior of that system. Our research considers a number of different aspects of systems biology such as the application of dynamical systems theory to biological systems, extraction, representation, integration and analysis of data from multiple experimental sources, and reconstruction of dynamic systems from the quantitative properties of their building blocks.

Affiliated Faculty

Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology

Theoretical ecology, disease ecology, population dynamics, and systems biology.

Chemistry & Biochemistry

Biochemistry; protein structure and function relationships; protein dynamics; chemotaxis in bacteria.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Basic mechanisms and disorders of neural plasticity; the role of microRNAs in stem cell differentiation.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Combining theory and experimentation to understand how navigational decisions come about in terms of neural-circuit computation.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Cellular communication between bacteria, including mechanisms and biology of contact-dependent growth inhibition; epigenetic gene regulatory mechanisms.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Microbial pathogenesis; innate and adaptive immune responses to infection; coagulopathy and inflammation of sepsis; vaccine development.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
Assistant Professor (by Courtesy) of
Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Macrophages patrol our tissues looking for signs of injury or infection. The Morrissey Lab wants to understand how macrophages measure, add and subtract all the signals they receive to calculate their response to a target. We use high resolution live imaging, synthetic biology and biochemistry to figure out when and where signaling molecules are activated to make these essential decisions. We are motivated by re-wiring macrophage signaling pathways to generate new cancer immunotherapies.

Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology

Aquatic Biology, Behavior, Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Evolutionary Ecology, Evolutionary Genetics, Macroevolution, Marine Biology, Organismal Biology, Zoology

Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, Biomolecular Science and Engineering

Professor Beth Pruitt interests lie at the intersection of mechanobiology, microfabrication, engineering and science and her lab specializes in engineering microsystems and biointerfaces for quantitative mechanobiology. 

Physics

Quantitative systems biology and bioinformatics; statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium systems.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Genetics, Neural Circuits, and Motor sequences.

Computer Science

Analysis of biological data including sequences, structures, and images; synthesis and analysis of biological networks.

Chemistry & Biochemistry

Design, synthesis, and characterization of new bioinorganic materials with an emphasis on understanding interface assembly & control of bioprocesses.

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

The Wilson Lab comines tools from Biology, Engineering, and Physics to understand the cell's perceptual field.  

Mechanical Engineering

Bioengineering, Synthetic Biology, Control Theory, Data Science