User Portlet

I am a pure mathematician by upbringing. I did my first degree at Imperial College, London and got my PhD studying algebraic topology with Frank Adams at Trinity College in Cambridge. I was then a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago and a Research Fellow in pure mathematics at Trinity College. I love pure mathematics for its beauty and rigour but have always had a hankering to see it used in the World. I taught some of the first computer science courses at the University of Chicago, which gave me the idea that pure mathematics could be used to analyse complex computing systems. That took me to industrial research at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Research Labs in Bristol, UK and Palo Alto, California, where I founded HP's Basic Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences (BRIMS). It was the genome projects that finally made me realise that the computing systems of the day were complicated but not complex and that true complexity is found in biology. That eventually led me back to academic life as an early faculty member in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. My lab has been studying cellular information processing using a combination of mathematical theory, computation and experiments. More recently, I have become fascinated by the question of learning in individual cells and that has brought me to Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.