Title: Simple models of complex biological systems
Speaker: Sergei Maslov, BNL
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Time: 01:00pm – 02:00pm
Place: Lecture Hall 102, Simons Center
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Abstract: We are ultimate complex systems ourselves and are surrounded by other complex systems in Nature, technology, and society. These systems can be computationally modeled at multiple levels of resolution but simple models are the best way to reveal the universal organization principles of complex systems. In my talk I will focus on three simple models of complex biological systems:
1) Topology and dynamics of networks of protein-protein interactions operating inside living cells
2) Population dynamics models of bacterial viruses and their hosts
3) Evolutionary dynamics of bacterial genomes
In my talks I will address questions such as âÂÂIn what way bacterial viruses are similar to financial investors?âÂÂ, âÂÂDo phages play dice?âÂÂ, âÂÂHow many bureaucrats does a genome need?âÂÂ, âÂÂWhy bacteria run Linux while eukaryotes (including us humans) run Windows?âÂÂ, and show the empirical evidence of ParkinsonâÂÂs Law in biology.
Sergei Maslov is a tenured scientist and the computational biology group leader at the department of Biosciences, Brookhaven National Laboratory and adjunct professor at the Laufer Center for Physical & Quantitative Biology, Physics Department, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University. He works on computational and evolutionary biology where he is focused on quantifying evolution of genomes and modeling complex bimolecular networks. In addition to biology he is also
interested in problems related to search and ranking in information and social networks: World Wide Web, Internet, software, scientific citations, etc.