| Sushmita Roy |
| Assistant Professor |
| Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics |
| Department of Computer Science |
| Systems Biology, Wisconsin Institute of Discovery (WID) |
| University of Wisconsin, Madison |
Contact
sroy at biostat dot wisc dot edu
WID Office (Main): 3168
MSC Office: 6749
Ph: 608-316-4453
How do living cells know what to do and when? Are there design principles that make living systems robust? How do organisms interact with their environment, and how does this lead to long-term adaptation and evolution of complex functions?
Seeking answers to these fundamental questions are a major goal of Systems Biology, as this can lead to a better understanding of complex behavior of organisms, and identify the causes and consequences of disease. To answer these question we must think of an organism as a system that functions via the interaction of its parts, the genes, proteins, metabolites and other small molecules. Advances in biotechnology are producing dynamic snap shots of parts in multiple organisms and multiple conditions. However, a fundamental challenge that remains is that the networks of interactions are not well-characterized.
My research focuses on developing statistical computational methods to identify the networks driving cellular functions by integrating different types of genome-wide datasets, that measure different aspects of the cellular state. We are interested in identifying networks under different environmental, developmental and evolutionary contexts, comparing these networks across contexts, and constructing predictive models from these networks. This can help us understand (1) how environmental information is processed in cells to mount appropriate condition-specific responses, (2) how these networks change across different contexts such as environmental stresses, cell-types, tissues, diseases, and, (3) how these networks have evolved to suit organism life-style and habitat. Most important, by comparing such networks across many different contexts, we can identify the general organizational principles as well as notable exceptions that underlie condition-specific and organism-specific behavior.
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