Sana Khanum
Sana joined our research group in Fall 2019 as a graduate research assistant. She did her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India. She will be working on cybernetic modeling of inflammatory systems. While cybernetic models have primarily focused on bacterial systems in the past, in our most recent work, we adapted the framework to model the dynamic behavior of prostaglandin formation during the inflammatory response of bone arrow derived macrophages in mammalian systems. This work was based on hypothesizing that the system goal is to maximize TNF-alpha. This research is in collaboration with the research group of Professor Shankar Subramaniam in Bioengineering at UCSD. Sana will expand the cybernetic goal of the system to include combinations of multiple phenotypic objectives subsumed into one optimal cybernetic goal for an organism using the maximization of mutual information between the weighted time series metabolite data and weighted combinations of multiple time series of transcriptomic data.
Post Graduate Researchers
Rubesh Raja
Rubesh joined our research group in May 2019 as a postdoctoral research associate. He has completed his Ph.D. at Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore, India and his bachelors at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. His research interests are biomathematical modeling, immunology, and infectious diseases.
Here, he works on a collaborative project with Prof. Shankar Subramanium at the Bioengineering department of the University of California, San Diego and Prof. Ananth Grama at the Computer Science department of the Purdue University. His project is to explore the cybernetic approach to modeling regulation in immune response cells such as Macrophage. The approach will be based on expanding the cybernetic goal of the system to include multiple phenotypic objectives subsumed into one optimal cybernetic goal for the organism using information theory.