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"Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness."
-- Simone De Beauvoir

"Four Enemies to knowledge: Fear, Clarity, Power, and Old Age"
-- Don Juan

A key property of living objects is that each object, whether they are proteins, cells, or whole organisms, has an associated generating process, that is, a decoding process whereby stored information is converted into a complex functioning biological object. For example, generating a protein involves translation and folding; generating an organism involves a cascade of gene regulatory and cell biological processes. We are interested in such bio-generative processes and understanding the temporal control, architecture, and evolution of these processes.

Since 2007, Jim Eberwine (Pharm) and I have been engaged in multiple joint projects concerning genomics of cell differentiation and cell diversity. Our labs collaborate in all kinds of projects where we bounce ideas off each other, design and carryout experiments together, and design analysis of data together. Many of the projects described below, especially in neuroscience are joint projects between our two labs.

In addition , we work on a wide range of collaborative projects and computational biology projects. Currently, these collaborations involve molecular control of neurons, functional prediction of sequence elements for genes involved in synaptic transmission, novel technologies for functional genomics, statistical analysis of whole-genome expression profiling, as well as software engineering bioinformatics analysis platforms. We employ a variety of techniques including discrete algorithms,simulations, statistical learning, dynamical systems and algebraic geometry, molecular biology, functional genomics, and single-cell genomics.

Research Areas



JK's Essays: Ground Strokes


"Those who like to talk about intelligence are like acorns who brag about their height; there are big ones and there are small ones but they are still acorns"
-- Old Korean Story