Ashok Prasad Postdoctoral Associate Department of Physics Room E19-536 Phone: 617-252-1744 Fax: 617-253-2272 E-mail: ashokp@mit.edu I am a former economist, who taught for a while in the University of Delhi, India, before coming to Brandeis University to do a Ph.D. in physics, which I completed in 2006. I worked in theoretical soft condensed matter physics - on semiflexible polymers, polymer dynamics and fluid dynamics of lipid membranes. I am now a postdoc in the computational immunology laboratory of Arup Chakraborty at MIT. By building mathematical models of the protein signaling networks that give T-cells their unique properties, in dose synergy with experiments, we hope to to be able to understand better the molecular origin of autoimmune diseases. I am currently building models of the signaling networks that play a crucial role in thymic selection.