Aviv Regev

MIT—Broad Institute

 

From cells to organisms to species, regulatory systems are constantly changing and evolving. Temporal changes in transcriptional regulation can be realized epigenetically within minutes, mediating responses to environmental stimuli, or genetically over millions of years through slow accumulation of evolutionary events. Recent advances in genomic profiling and manipulation technologies have opened up the way to chart and dissect expression dynamics at unprecedented scope and detail.  Here, I present our work on using integrative experimental and computational approaches to reconstruct dynamic changes in regulatory circuits. We follow fast responses in the response of mammalian cells to pathogens, to the slower changes that govern cell differentiation in the blood, and up to the evolution of transcriptional circuits over hundreds of millions of years.

 

Bio

Computational biologist Aviv Regev joined the Broad Institute as a core faculty member in 2006. Her research centers on understanding how complex molecular networks function and evolve in the face of genetic and environmental changes. She studied for a direct M.Sc. At the Interdisciplinary Program for the Fostering of Excellence at Tel Aviv University, where she focused mostly on biology, computer science and mathematics, and did research in theoretical biology (on the evolution of development) and experimental biology (on genomic instability). In her Ph.D. research (with Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University and Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute) she developed a novel representation language for biomolecular processes based on a computer process algebra — a framework originally developed for studying concurrent computation systems.

 

In parallel, Aviv worked for several years in the biotech industry in Israel, where she established and directed a bioinformatics R&D team at QBI, a functional genomics company. In the past several years she has been a fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard University, where she worked on the reconstruction of regulatory networks and modules from genomics data. 

 

In addition to her position at the Broad Institute, Aviv is an assistant professor in the department of biology at MIT and an Early Career Scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2008, she received the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. She is a past recipient of the

Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award.

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

 

Computer Science

Joint Colloquium

Center for Comparative and Poulation Genomics

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium

It's About Time:

The Function & Evolution of Regulatory circuits