Graduate Student Opportunity at the Institute for Genome Sciences
Radu Victor Balan
Graduate Students:
Below is an opportunity for a short-term project, lab research assistant position, summer internship, or a longer-term RAship.
If you're planning to take AMSC 663, this could also serve as a potential project topic for the course.
For more details, please reach out to Prof. Elana Fertig (UMB/UMD) – contact information see below.
Biological systems are comprised of multi-scale cellular and molecular networks that regulate their function. These networks can change over time, with rewiring causing complex diseases such as cancer. In spite of this being a systems-level problem of network dynamics, experimental technologies and statistical analysis approaches often focus on inferring the dynamics and function of subgraphs of these systems in isolation to seek biological mechanism. While individual subgraphs can seem to have one dynamic function (e.g., oscillatory), coupling of multiple subgraphs can alter that function over time. However, impact of coupling and node function on the network-wide states remains unknown. Of particular interest is the coupling between dynamically evolving gene regulatory networks and the dynamics of protein signaling networks expressed by these genes. We seek a co-mentored graduate student to explore the theoretical properties of the dynamics of complex, coupled protein and gene network dynamics and their applications to real-world biological networks in cancer biology.
- Graduate student in physics, mathematics, statistics, bioinformatics, computer science, or related field
- Background in the theory of nonlinear dynamics and complex networks
- Programming experience in Python, Julia, or similar
- Prior experience in gene and cell regulatory network inference encouraged
Elana J Fertig, PhD, FAIMBE
Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences
Associate Director of Quantitative Sciences, UM Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center
Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology (secondary)
University of Maryland, School of Medicine
AMSC-affiliated faculty, UMD
@fertiglab.bsky.social
Pronouns: she/her/hers