Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics are sponsored jointly by the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Biological Sciences (BIO) to encourage research and training that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries between them. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients (biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others). It is expected that the Fellows trained through these fellowships will play an important role in training the future workforce. Postdoctoral research and training in informatics will permit junior scientists trained in biology, mathematical, chemical, and physical sciences to play key roles in developing new quantitative tools and methods that will advance informatics in biology and other fields.
The research and training plan is entitled "Automatically determining logical rules for how genes are regulated based on expression levels observed under different conditions and over time." Determining how large networks of genes function and interact with each other is one of the great challenges facing molecular biology. The goal of this project is to study the problem of automatically inferring Boolean-differential models of gene networks based on observed expression levels under different conditions and over time. Specific plans include: (1) developing algorithms to infer Boolean-differential models, (2) theoretically estimating how much data is required in order to have confidence in an inferred model, and (3) applying these ideas to model the Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) segmentation network.
