The brain and body are inextricable in solving the pressing challenges faced by the animal. I will talk about our ongoing work with collaborators to build embodied models of the brain, where the nervous system interfaces explicitly with models of the body, including its kinematics, dynamics, and biomechanics. Our models are agent-based and…

Protein expression levels optimize cell fitness: Too low an expression level of essential proteins will slow growth by compromising essential processes; whereas overexpression slows growth by increasing the metabolic load. This trade-off naively predicts that cells maximize their fitness by sufficiency, expressing just enough of each essential…

The concepts of energy and energy landscapes have been central to the understanding of many types of neural network computation.  As Hopfield illustrated in the 1980's, generalizing the homogenous Ising model of magnetism to allow individually tunable symmetric point-to-point interactions yields a beautiful mathematical metaphor for…

Eukaryotic cells contain organelle systems that organize and distribute molecular components. In this talk we will explore two such systems: mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), both of which form extensively networked architectures that span across the cell. While functionally distinct, both of these organelles give rise to…