“Applications of Computational Biology and Systems Biology to Tissue Engineering”

Computational biology and systems biology are developing a wealth of computational tools to deal with the rapidly accumulating information on biological systems. The computational study of molecular interactions has led to advances in drug design. The analysis of protein-protein interaction networks, signaling networks, transcription networks, and metabolic networks has shed light to the complex interconnections in the cell and has lead to an improved understanding of cell processes and their relation to healthy and disease states. Tissue engineering has so far ripped limited benefits from advances in computational biology and systems biology. This talk will highlight available resources and computational tools that can be of benefit to researchers working in the tissue engineering field. The talk will also touch upon active research topics in Kavraki’s laboratory on the elucidation of protein function.

BIOGRAPHY

Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University. She also holds an appointment at the Department of Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Kavraki received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning), as well as in computational structural biology, translational bioinformatics, and biomedical informatics (modeling of proteins and biomolecular interactions, large-scale functional annotation of proteins, computer-assisted drug design, and systems biology). Kavraki has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, one textbook and is currently an associate editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research, the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Computer Science Review, and Big Data. Among other awards, Kavraki is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her technical contributions. Kavraki is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the World Technology Network (WTN). Kavraki was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies in 2012. More information about her work can be found at http://www.kavrakilab.org and http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki.

When: Monday, March 11th at 4:10 PM

Where: 1005 GBSF