Mission
We aim to understand the function and evolution of the complex molecular networks that underlie life.
To do so, we integrate computational systems biology, population genetics, and molecular evolution.
We build and analyze mathematical simulations of protein networks to probe their function, and we analyze genomic data to undercover signatures of population history and natural selection, with an emphasis on humans.
Our group is interdisciplinary and collaborative, with an atmosphere that promotes both hard work and creativity.
News
May 9, 2013
Congatulations to Siddharth Pandya for his senior thesis entitled "Directional selection on tyrosine frequencies in eukaryotes versus solvent accessibility". In Fall, Sidd will begin Medical School at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix.
Congratulations as well to Katie Cunningham her senior thesis entitled "Optimization in the demographic simulation software ∂a∂i". She will be pursuing opportunities in CS education.
April 2, 2013
Congratulations to Benson Hsieh, who has been awarded a Taiwanese Government Scholarship for Studying Abroad!
April 1, 2013
Benson Hsieh's work on inferring African history has been featured on the UA Research Computing website.
March 29, 2013
Congratulations to Brian Mannakee, who has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
March 26, 2013
Congratulations to Benson Hsieh and Brian Mannakee, who have been named Galileo Circle Scholars!
March 7, 2013
Congratulations to Brian Mannakee, who has been named an ARCS Foundation Scholar!
Older news -
Public wiki - Internal wiki
May 1, 2012
Congatulations to Aaron Ragsdale, who has accepted an IGERT Fellowship in Comparative Genomics!
April 25, 2012
Congatulations to Brian Mannakee for his senior thesis entitled "Evolutionary Rate at the Protein Domain Level is Constrained by Importance to Network Dynamics". In Fall, Brian will begin pursuing his Ph.D. with the University of Arizona Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Statistics.
March 1, 2012
The group is proud to have been awarded NSF grant DEB-1146074 to fund its work on "Demographic History Inference from Genomic Linkage and Allele Frequency Spectra".
February 27, 2012
Sasha Jilkine gave an invited talk about her work on cell polarity and cancer at the University of Oregon.
February 25, 2012
Congratulations to Siddharth Pandya! He won an award for his poster at the 2012 Biological, Engineering, and Chemical Undergraduate Research (BECUR) conference at the University of Arizona.
February 8, 2012
Ryan spoke about the lab's work on connecting protein evolution and protein network dynamics at a workshop on Robustness in Biology at Ohio State's Mathematical Biosciences Institute.
December 4, 2011
We are seeking a postdoctoral scholar to join us in developing and applying methods for inferring population history and natural selection from genomic data. For more details, see Opportunities.
November 4, 2011
Congratulations to Brian Mannakee! He won the BIO5 Innovator Award for his poster at the 2011 Graduate and Professional Student Association Student Showcase.
August 13, 2011
Brian Mannakee presented a poster about our recent work on protein evolution and network dynamics at the 2011 q-bio Conference on Cellular Information Processing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sasha Jilkine also spoke on her previous work with the Wu and Altschuler lab.
August 3, 2011
Brian Mannakee gave a great talk about our recent work on protein evolution and network dynamics at the 2011 q-bio Summer School on Cellular Information Processing in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Earlier that day, Ryan lectured at the school on Systems biology's dirty secret: parameter estimation.
July 27, 2011
Ryan spoke about our recent work on protein evolution and network dynamics in a syposium on Evolutionary Systems Biology at the 2011 meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in lovely Kyoto, Japan.
July 13, 2011
Ryan was quoted in New Scientist (pdf), in refence to Li and Dubin's remarkable paper on human history inference from from single genomes.
July 5, 2011
Welcome to Sasha Jilkine, the newest member of the Gutengroup. Sasha is a mathematical biologist who has previously worked on modeling cell polarity with Leah Edelstein-Keshset and with Steve Altschuler and Lani Wu. During her postdoc here, she will be modeling the evolution of protein networks.
July 4, 2011
Our work on inferring human history (collaborative with Carlos
Bustamante) was featured in the New York Times (pdf).