CURRENT AFFILIATION
Post Doctoral Research Associate, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, 211 Wartik Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
RESEARCH INTERESTS
We now appreciate more fully that genes, proteins, molecular machines, regulatory processes, cells tissues and organs themselves do not work in isolation-emphatically telling us that we cannot continue to study them in isolation only. To derive the principles and mechanisms of life�s processes, we must use a systems approach to dynamically analyze all these elements in cells, populations and communities and in environments in which they naturally live.
For example we must image and functionally analyze the critical molecular machines within a biological organism as it responds to environmental cues and signals from other organisms. High throughput technologies must be used to gather data about the whole system. We must then be able to computationally encompass and model our findings constrained by everything we understand about the relevamt biophysical principles, genomic information, cellular composition, environmental and life startegies to see the cell and community in full functional dissection. Many different types of data must be integrated into data and metadata structures that capture great biological richness and range well into petabyte (million gegabyte scale) presenting enormous challenges in design, data mining and visualisation. New tools for making this information useful to all biologists will also be required, including faster and more capable computer architecture tied together in faster networks linked into research laboratories. Substantial advances in mathematical, statistical and algorithmic methods clearly will be needed to power the new infrastructure. Biology is now becoming a computational science.
The recent advances should bring us to the verge of a revolution in biology not only by providing the high throughput, high quality experimental data required for systems biology, but also by developing the computational infrastructure, algortihms and tools to fully exploit these data and extract knowledge and insights from the progress. As a biologist trained in the experimental methods my current interests are in collecting high throughput and high quality experimental data. As an electrcial engineer my wife Ritu Grover is interested in developing the computational infrastructure required to analyze such data. Together we aim to contribute to emergence of a new mathematical, quantitative predictive and ultimately systems level paradigm for the life sciences.
