Event Report: Computational and Systems Biology Symposium

Aleksandra Walczak
eLife Senior Editor
Ecole Normale Supérieure, France

Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at UCSD working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, California, she took up a fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing in small gene regulatory networks. Currently she is a CNRS researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in a variety of problems in the physics of living systems. She actively works on development, collective behavior of bird flocks and statistical descriptions of the immune system.

Gautam Reddy
NSF-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Gautam received his doctorate in Physics from UC San Diego. His work has largely focused on two aspects of computational neuroscience: algorithmic aspects of animal behavior & the neurobiology of mammalian olfaction. In past work, he has studied how birds navigate thermals in the atmosphere, how animals find food or mates using olfactory cues and how sensory systems extract useful task-relevant information from a complex stimulus. Broadly, he is interested in how biological systems make decisions under various constraints imposed by physical laws, physiology, and the limits of computation. Since 2019, he has been a Fellow at the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Harvard University.

Kanaka Rajan
Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, USA

Kanaka Rajan, Ph.D. is a Computational Neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes. Using data from neuroscience experiments, Kanaka applies computational frameworks derived from machine learning and statistical physics to uncover integrative theories about the brain that bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.

Erik van Nimwegen
University of Basel, Switzerland

Prof. Erik van Nimwegen is Professor in Computational Systems Biology at the Biozentrum (Centre for Molecular Life Sciences) of the University of Basel in Switzerland. He heads a research group who apply theoretical and experimental approaches to study the function and evolution of the regulatory networks that cells use to control the expression of their genes.

Hélène Morlon
Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

After training in mathematics, Hélène did a Masters and PhD in ecology in France and then spent 5 years ½ as a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolution at UC Merced, the UO Eugene, UPenn and UC Berkeley. Hélène is now a CNRS research director at the Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and her lab is interested in understanding how historical and contemporary processes shape present-day patterns of biological diversity.