Description of Research Expertise

evolution of gene regulation and developmental systems

A key property of living objects is that each object, whether they are proteins, cells, or whole organisms, has an associated generating process—that is, a decoding process whereby stored information is converted into a complex functioning biological object. For example, generating a protein involves translation and folding; generating an organism involves a cascade of gene regulatory and cell biological processes. We are interested in such “bio-generative processes” and understanding general principles of these processes. Questions include how to infer the organizational structure of such generative processes from available data, how do the generative processes evolve, and how the generative processes and selection on the generative processes affect the final form of the biological object. Currently, we have three related projects in this area.

Description of Itmat Expertise

Dr. Kim's work involves statistical methods for functional and comparative genomics, laboratory investigations of yeast cell-cycle evolution, data analysis for cancer genomics, and algorithm development for computational phylogenetics.