A living system, like any complex entity, is more than the sum of its parts. It can be as simple as a virus or as complex as an ecosystem. Researchers at WID aspire to gain an understanding of how such systems function, as well as how they adapt to and shape their environments over different time scales.
An interdisciplinary group of engineers, computer scientists, physicists, and evolutionary biologists take a multi-pronged approach to understanding living systems. We develop and combine experimental and computational methods to study diverse problems, ranging from interactions between organisms (e.g., between hosts and pathogens, and within diverse microbial communities) and interaction networks within organisms (e.g., regulatory and metabolic interactions). A common theme to complex biological systems research at WID is to view these systems through the lens of evolution.
A team of UW-Madison researchers led by Discovery Fellow Wendy Crone has created a powerful tool to help assess what experimental factors help to produce stem cell-generated cardiomyocytes that behave like adult heart cells.
WID’s Shaoqin “Sarah” Gong is a collaborator on a paper published in Nature Communications in which UW engineers constructed a functional microwave amplifier circuit on a substrate of cellulose nanofibril paper, a wood product.
John Yin is working to find out whether “junk” particles produced by mouse viruses exist in human coronaviruses, and whether they may be the key to understanding how the viruses spread and interact with host cells.
John Yin has received a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant and an Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) to work on projects related to human coronaviruses.
WID’s John Yin, who uses experimental and computational methods to understand how viruses spread, is working on several projects that could have a direct bearing on COVID-19.
Focusing on the researches of small-diameter vascular grafts and rapid endothelialization
WID Director Jo Handelsman shared a conversation on Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda and on WUWM about soil and microbes.
WID researchers have developed a computational tool that can accurately predict the three-dimensional interactions between regions of human chromosomes.
Discovery Fellow David Baum leads a team that has cultivated lifelike chemical reactions while pioneering a new strategy for studying the origin of life.
Xuehua Zhong’s close study of an ordinary plant’s cellular mechanisms could lead to big advances in agriculture and medicine. Zhong is featured in Grow magazine.
Theoretical research on the emergence of life-like systems from chemical reaction networks
An interdisciplinary pair of WID researchers has developed a new nanocapsule delivery method for delivering the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. The new system could be used for many types of gene therapies.
Claudia Solís-Lemus and Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón are experts in statistics and machine learning, augmenting WID’s data science expertise.
WID graduate student Arezoo Movaghar was a collaborator in a study that employed machine learning to mine decades of electronic health records of nearly 20,000 individuals.
Assistant Professor
My research involves the development of statistical models to answer biological questions.
Exploring multitask learning algorithms for single cell network inference
