UG Seminar with Keon Abedi on Building a Periodic Table of Diseases

The idea that living systems are information processing devices, when put into mathematical language, sparked developments in everything from systems biology (gene transcription networks) to neuroscience (neural networks) to ecology (foo webs). What if we apply the same idea to physiology (i.e., tissues and organs)?

In this talk, we’ll view the human body as a collection of recurring “biocircuits", and use simple tools from physics (mainly nonlinear dynamics) to see that fragilities in these biocircuits correspond to disease in the actual tissue/organ. By translating insights from these models to actual biological examples, we’ll find quantitative patterns across cell types, tissues, and organs: together, these patterns form an emerging “Periodic Table of Diseases” that can be used to understand, predict, and (hopefully) steer physiological systems in health and disease!