Our Research Focus

The research in our lab focuses on fundamental problems in biology: how do individual cells from multicellular organisms use multiple layers of regulation to achieve the cellular phenotypes maintenance and transition, and how do cells communicate with each other through paracrine and autocrine to establish complex pathological phenotypes in tissue level? How to find the optimal treatment design for complex diseases? Cellular phenotype plasticity and dysregulation have been documented in many diseases. Therefore, it is an emerging yet undeveloped field of uncovering the underlying design principles of cellular phenotype and pathological phenotypes transition.

Our Interdisciplinary Approaches

To address the above questions, we combine multidisciplinary and multiscale modeling and quantitative experimental approaches. Our research has the following prominent features. 1) Our research is highly interdisciplinary, combining approaches from mathematics, physics, biophysics, bioinformatics, single-cell image analysis, as well as data integration. 2) we are developing our wet lab and we also closely work with experimental collaborators, either by providing theoretical insights and interpretations or by designing novel experiments to verify computationally derived predictions. Iterative communications between modeling and experimental studies are the most effective way in our lab to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of complex biological processes.