Research Interests

My current research interests are in understanding the molecular mechanisms that process information in living cells. Cell systems represent a particular challenge in this regard in that their machinery is capable of operating over many orders of magnitude in both space and time. Computational modeling is particularly suited to making conjectures about how systems operate over a high dynamic range in these domains, and these conjectures can then be verified or refuted in the laboratory. Presently I am constructing a model of concurrent activation of the JNK and NF-kappa B signaling pathways, with the goal of understanding how the basal state of the system biases the cellular response towards one or the other of these two contradictory signals. The results could have implications to our basic understanding of why different cell types respond differently to the same set of inflammatory and apoptotic signals.