Biology

We study the evolution of complex traits by developing new experimental and computational methods.

Although genetics is often taught in terms of simple Mendelian traits, most traits are far more complex. They evolve via a multitude of genetic changes, each having a small effect by itself, which in sum give rise to the spectacular adaptation of every organism to its environment.

We are a highly interdisciplinary research team, joined in our desire to derive a more mechanistic understanding of prokaryotic life.

To elucidate how bacterial cells accumulate biomass and grow,  we study the model organism Escherichia coli. Our approaches tightly combine quantitative experimentation with mathematical modeling to consider the coordination of major physiological processes across scales; from metabolism and protein synthesis, via cell-size control, to swimming.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each making thousands of synaptic connections. While individual neurons can themselves perform sophisticated information processing, it is the assembly of neurons into circuits via specific patterns of synaptic connections that endows our brain with the computational capacity to sense, act, think, and remember.

We discover and elucidate new Ca2+-regulated signaling pathways in humans by studying calcineurin, the conserved Ca2+/calmodulin-regulated protein phosphatase. The calcineurin phosphatase dephosphorylates proteins only when Ca2+ signaling is triggered, for example by a hormone, growth factor, neurotransmitter etc. Previous work from the Cyert lab showed how calcineurin allows yeast cells to survive environmental stress (Goldman et al, 2014, Molecular Cell).

Our research investigates how environmental changes like climate and land use change are affecting infectious diseases in humans and wildlife. We use tools from disease ecology, including mathematical and statistical models, health surveillance data, remotely sensed data, laboratory experiments, and field surveys to better understand the mechanisms by which changes in temperature and habitat affect vectors and disease transmission. 

We are a chemical biology laboratory focused on the development of technologies to map molecules, cells, and functional circuits. We apply the technologies to understand signaling in the mitochondria and in the mammalian brain.

Our lab is interested in how stem cell-like populations are created and maintained in developing, environmental responsive tissues.  We primarily use the Arabidopsis stomatal lineage for these studies because this epidermal cell lineage distills features common to all tissue development: stomatal precursor cells are chosen from an initially equivalent field, they undergo asymmetric and self-renewing divisions, they communicate among themselves to establish pattern and they terminally differentiate into stable, physiologically important cell-types.  In the past decade, we have developed the