Aneil is the inventor of little b. He is interested in computational tools for aiding scientific decision making and collaboration. Prior to joining the Systems Department, he led a number of technology development efforts at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, a company which pioneered high-throughput genome-based drug discovery. Aneil received his PhD at UCSF in the study of actin and microtubule-based cell dynamics, and along the way develop a number of optical and imaging tools for quantifying cell dynamics, including the first micro-scale chromophore assisted laser inactivation microscope. He continues to work on the system kernel from his home in San Francisco.

Jeremy is a mathematician with a long interest in complex systems. He leads the Virtual Cell Project at Harvard Medical School where he is building a center for theoretically-minded biologists and biologically-minded theorists. Amongst many other things, he is interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying ultrasensitive response in signal transduction systems. He is using the language to investigate these problems and to teach an undergraduate course in systems biology.

KSR-1 scaffold One model examined the effects of the KSR-1 scaffold on signal transduction. ecause scaffolds are capable of forming complexes with several molecules, each of which may have multiple phosphorylation states, writing models involves accounting for a large number of species and reactions. Matt wrote modules which handle this problem by inference.

Segment polarity network In another project he modeled the segment polarity network in irregular cell lattices, to examine the effect of lattice structure on network behavior.

Sudhakaran is one of the theoretically minded biologists in the virtual cell group. He joined Jeremy's group to understand multi-site phosphorylation and signal transduction. He is primarily interested in how interactions in complex systems lead to self-organization and emergence of behavior. He is hoping to develop models of drosophila eye development and patterning with little b to understand multi-cellular interactions and organization.

As a summer student, Ben developed components for describing lattices consisting of cells with multiple membrane segments. Cells abut one another, allowing complexes to form where membranes are apposed.

Using little b to specify generic components for modeling endocytosis and recycling of receptors, and intra-cellular trafficking. Generic organelles will provide a means for generating n membrane-bound compartments and specifying transport reactions which move components between them. This module will be used to model EGF receptor biology.

Fascinated by the vision that life could be described as a self-organizing machine once the parts and interactions are known, I began to study molecular biotechnology in Heidelberg, Germany in 2002. I soon realized that in spite of the rapid improvement of experimental techniques, it is the current lack of useful abstractions that largely hinders us from building powerful and predictive models of biological processes. With a personal background in computer-science, my current research interests comprise new ways of describing biological systems as well as automated image analysis and robotics.