brooksan

Microbes are enormously powerful. Natural selection in microbial populations has generated solutions to difficult problems that are unrivaled by human engineering: microorganisms thrive in extreme environments once thought inhospitable to life; they produce products that are commercially and medically valuable; and they transform their environments in dramatic ways. Natural microbial communities, however, have been severely understudied. Some of the most elegant solutions to pressing social and environmental problems are likely found within the molecular machinery of these systems. To harness the power of natural biological systems, we need predictive models of cellular physiology that enable rational reengineering. Towards that goal, I develop methodological and computational tools to recover high-resolution, kinetic models predictive of transcriptional dynamics from finely-resolved single-cell reporter data.