Jeremy Gunawardena

Last updated
Jeremy Gunawardena
Alma mater University of Cambridge (Ph.D.)
Known for Little b
Scientific career
Fields Systems biology, Mathematical biology, Algebraic topology
Institutions Harvard

Jeremy Gunawardena is a mathematician and systems biologist [1] who is Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. [2] His lab focuses on cellular information processing. [3]

Contents

Education

He received a BSc in mathematics from Imperial College, London, where he was awarded the Sir John Lubbock Memorial Prize for the highest-ranked first class degree in the University of London. [4] He did Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, for which he was awarded a J T Knight Prize in Class 1, and went on to do his PhD in algebraic topology with Frank Adams at Cambridge. [5]

Career

He was elected to a Research Fellowship in Pure Mathematics at Trinity College. [6] [7] Before taking up his Fellowship, he spent two years as L.E. Dickson Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. [8] He subsequently spent several years in industrial research at HP Labs in Bristol, UK. [9] [10] He also served as a Member of Council of the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). [11] In 2002, Gunawardena become a Visiting Scientist at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard. [12] In 2003, he joined the newly formed Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. [13]

Work

Gunawardena's PhD thesis led to the solution, with Frank Adams and Haynes Miller, of the Segal conjecture for elementary abelian groups, [14] which provided the algebraic starting point for Gunnar Carlsson's solution of the full conjecture. [15] At the University of Chicago, he helped to set up the first computer science courses at the University. [16] At HP Labs, Gunawardena created the Basic Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences (BRIMS), a pioneering academic-industrial partnership with the University of Bristol and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. [17] [18]

At Harvard Medical School, Gunawardena's lab studies information processing in eukaryotic cells, with a focus on mechanisms like post-translational modification, gene regulation and allostery. [19] Gunawardena has had a long-standing interest in the interface between mathematics and biology, on which he has written several perspectives. [20] His essay on Models in biology: ‘accurate descriptions of our pathetic thinking’ in BMC Biology. [21]

Gunawardena's lab has developed over several years a mathematical approach for analyzing biomolecular systems called the 'linear framework in which theorems can be proved about biological processes. [22]

Gunawardena has been exploring the concept of cellular learning, bringing ideas from cognitive science and psychology to bear on the behavior of individual cells. [23] He was awarded a European Research Council synergy grant to study this, 'CeLEARN: learning in single cells through dynamical internal representations', together with Aneta Koseska, Dietmar Schmucker and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo. [24]

One of his most cited papers, "Multisite protein phosphorylation makes a good threshold but can be a poor switch" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [25] has received 280 citations according to Google Scholar. [26]

Gunawardena introduced, with Aneil Mallavarapu, the programming-with-models approach to virtual cells, which led to the programming language little b. [27]

Together with Marc Kirschner, Lew Cantley, Walter Fontana and Johan Paulsson, he helped set up and co-taught Systems Biology 200, one of the first courses to discuss the core mathematical ideas needed in systems biology. [28] He also founded the weekly series of Theory Lunch chalk talks, which has been running since 2003 and has brought some of the culture of the mathematical sciences into systems biology. [29]

Selected publications

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References

  1. ↑ "Jeremy Gunawardena – Learning and cognition in single biological cells (2 June 2022)". Trinity Japan. 24 January 2022.
  2. ↑ Leigh, Doug; Watkins, Ryan; Gunawardena, Jeremy (17 March 2020). "The Minds of Single-celled Organisms – Jeremy Gunawardena". Parsing Science. doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.12006792.
  3. ↑ "Jeremy Gunawardena gave an online talk titled "Following the energy in cellular information processing" at the IBS Biomedical Mathematics Colloquium". Biomedical Mathematics Group. 18 November 2021.
  4. ↑ Cameron, David. "Biology Enters The Matrix Through New Computer Language". Lab Manager.
  5. ↑ "Jeremy Harin Charles Gunawardena". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved January 17, 2022.
  6. ↑ "CDS Lecture Series". isr.umd.edu. Retrieved January 17, 2022.
  7. ↑ "Crick Lecture | Jeremy Gunawardena". Crick. 9 July 2024.
  8. ↑ "Jeremy Gunawardena". Biomedical Mathematics Group. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
  9. ↑ "A non-equilibrium view of cellular information processing | BioQuant". www.bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de.
  10. ↑ "Invited seminar at BRIMS, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories". University of Portsmouth.
  11. ↑ "Systems Biology Seminar". UT Southwestern Events Calendar.
  12. ↑ "Biology, Biology and Physics, Biotechnology, and Biotech Management". Nature. 414 (6866): 4. December 2001. doi:10.1038/nj6866-04a.
  13. ↑ "Biology enters 'The Matrix' through new computer language". Phys Org.
  14. ↑ https://math.mit.edu/~hrm/papers/adams-gunawardena-miller-segal-conjecture.pdf THE SEGAL CONJECTURE FOR ELEMENTARY ABELIAN p-GROUPS J. F. ADAMS, J. H. GUNAWARDENA and H. MILLER
  15. ↑ Lück, Wolfgang (2020-04-23). "The Segal conjecture for infinite discrete groups". Algebraic & Geometric Topology. 20 (2): 965–986. arXiv: 1901.09250 . doi:10.2140/agt.2020.20.965. ISSN   1472-2739.
  16. ↑ "Talk of Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena | Event | Apr 30, 2019 | Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control | University of Stuttgart". www.ist.uni-stuttgart.de. Retrieved 2024-11-18.
  17. ↑ "Jeremy Gunawardena – Giovanni Armenise Harvard Foundation" . Retrieved 2024-11-18.
  18. ↑ Gunawardena, J; N Hao; B A Budnik; E K O'Shea (2013). "Tunable signal processing through modular control of transcription factor translocation". Science. 339 (6118): 460–4. Bibcode:2013Sci...339..460H. doi:10.1126/science.1227299. PMC   3746486 . PMID   23349292.
  19. ↑ Tyson, John J.; Novák, Béla (2015-07-01). "Models in biology: lessons from modeling regulation of the eukaryotic cell cycle". BMC Biology. 13 (1): 46. doi: 10.1186/s12915-015-0158-9 . ISSN   1741-7007. PMC   4486427 . PMID   26129844.
  20. ↑ Gunawardena, J; Y Xu (2012). "Realistic enzymology for post-translational modification: zero-order ultrasensitivity revisited". J Theor Biol. 311: 139–152. Bibcode:2012JThBi.311..139X. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.07.012. PMC   3432734 . PMID   22828569.
  21. ↑ Woolston, Chris (2014). "Maths reality check resonates online". Nature. 509 (7500): 263. doi:10.1038/509263e. ISSN   1476-4687.
  22. ↑ Martinez-Corral, Rosa; Nam, Kee-Myoung; DePace, Angela H.; Gunawardena, Jeremy (2024-05-28). "The Hill function is the universal Hopfield barrier for sharpness of input–output responses". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 121 (22): e2318329121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2318329121. PMC   11145184 . PMID   38787881.
  23. ↑ "Cells that learn: ERC Synergy Grant fuels revolutionary… - MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR NEUROBIOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR — CAESAR". mpinb.mpg.de. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  24. ↑ "Dynamical Systems Biology lab". Dynamical Systems Biology lab. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  25. ↑ PNAS full text
  26. ↑ "Google Scholar".
  27. ↑ "Little b - Programming language". pldb.io. Retrieved 2024-11-18.
  28. ↑ "Jeremy Gunawardena | Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology". ssqbiophd.hms.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-18.
  29. ↑ "2023 Seminars | Applied Mathematics". appliedmath.brown.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-18.
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