 Aleksandra Walczak
2007-2010 Postdoctoral Fellow
Biological Physics
609-258-5592
412A Jadwin Hall
E-mail
I am interested in understanding the behaviour of strongly coupled nonlinear systems that are not in equilibrium. Examples of such problems may be found in both biology and condensed matter. Recently, my biologically inspired research has focussed on stochastic gene regulation. I studied toy models of regulatory networks to understand how different contributions to noise influence the many body interactions (and vice versa) of proteins and genes. My main interest in biological systems lies in the description of systems on the cellular scale - understanding the link between function, development and evolvability of conserved pathways and mechanisms. I have also been working on problems in the physics of glasses. I have been trying to understand the particular phases that arise in the stripe glass Hamiltonian model, which describes the interplay of competing interactions on short and long lengthscales. I am especially interested in the existence and dynamics of the glass phase.
Recent publications:
- A stochastic spectral analysis of transcriptional regulatory cascades
A. M. Walczak, A. Mugler and C. H. Wiggins, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106, 6529, (2009)
- Optimizing information flow in small genetic networks.
G. Tkacik, A. M. Walczak and W. Bialek, q-bio/0903.4491
- Constructing explicit magnetic analogies for the dynamics of glass forming liquids
J. D. Stevenson, A. M. Walczak, R. W. Hall and P. G. Wolynes, Journal of Chemical Physics 106,194505, (2008)
- The Energy Landscapes of Repeat-Containing Proteins: Topology, Cooperativity and the Folding Funnels of One-Dimensional Architectures
A. M. Walczak, D. U. Ferreiro, E. A. Komives and P. G. Wolynes, PLoS Computational Biology 4,e1000070, (2008)
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