Tissues System Biology
Student and research staff from CSB programme exchanging pointers
A diverse research team – with expertise in computational modelling, cell biology, imaging technology, hepatology and translational medicine – is studying the system-level regulation of cytokine activation in liver cirrhosis and liver fibrosis. Lakshmi Venkatraman, an NTU doctoral student with a bioinformatics background, measures whether liver cells actually perform a concerted transition that she predicted with computational modeling. Li Huipeng, an NUS doctoral student with a background in physics, is working to augment Venkatraman's cellular model for the prediction of tissue-scale phenomena. The fruitful interplay between experimentation and simulation continues as incoming graduate students learn from more senior lab members, and as scientists of different backgrounds educate one another regardless of rank. The collaborative mandate of the Singapore-MIT Alliance converges ideally with the multi-disciplinary needs of doing research in computational systems biology.