Jonathan W. Martin
University of Texas at Dallas, Computational biologist
Hello! I’m a PhD researcher, interested in how complex biological systems adapt to their environment.
I’m fascinated by the methods which living organisms use to store information in functional systems; things like proteins, protein networks, and higher order structures like cellular networks. Questions like:
- What is the “functional” capacity of a polymer like a protein?
- Also, how do we even define function in a meaningful way for this question? (see this cool paper with my friend Charisse Nartey!)
- How efficiently can biological systems capture information about the environment? (maximum predictive power of a future environmental state, lowest amount of information; how close is evolution to this?)
- How quickly can organisms adapt to a changing environment? On what timescales should we expect adaptation given some environmental change?
Also interested in designing information theoretic approaches to enzyme design/characterization because they are powerful for situations biologists commonly live in: lack of prior experimental validation and low resources for testing (see my work in this eLife paper).
And… I’m an avid birdwatcher! I love birds, and also photographing them!
