Computational Biology: Developmental Dynamics

Our theoretical and computational work is designed to integrate and abstract rapidly accumulating heterogeneous datasets, propose critical tests of multiscale regulatory mechanisms, and guide our own genetic and imaging experiments.

Our research is organized around three main themes:

• the mechanistic modeling of pattern formation and morphogenesis
• the synthesis and decomposition of developmental trajectories
• the modeling of human developmental defects

Current projects focus on small cell clusters (motivated by our work on early embryos and animal germline development), graph dynamics in rearranging cell networks (motivated by problems of epithelial morphogenesis), and the effects of activating mutations in signaling enzymes (motivated by our work on a large class of human developmental abnormalities).