philosophy

My general philosophy/approach to research is to link the singular to the collective in a meaningful way. What properties of a single cell, protein, or pathway can we measure and perturb to better understand the behavior of many cells, many proteins, or many intersecting pathways? One of the most abstract but exciting concepts in modern biology (and in modern science in general) is that the singular and the collective diverge from each other in scale-dependent ways. This idea is beautifully described in P.W. Anderson’s “More Is Different”.

Mathematical models serve an important role in building intuition (at least, for me) about the singular-to-collective transition. The Vicsek and Toner-Tu models of flocking, in particular, are beautiful examples of complex behavior arising from simple instruction manuals: although fish, birds, and other organisms that display collective movement are incredibly internally complex, the ability to recapitulate their general motions using these models is uncanny.

Rather than purely modeling for modeling’s sake, I seek to combine intuition-building modeling with experimentation in order to uncover design principles of biology. This way, models can be interrogated with data to identify their shortcomings and build robustness in our understanding. Rob Phillip’s “Figure 1 or Figure 7?” modeling framework has greatly influenced the way in which I incorporate math into my work.