Monday, May 1, 2017, 6:30 - 8 p.m. PDT

2017 Mindlin Lecture
Featuring Hana El-Samad (UCSF), "Untangling the Feedback Loops: An Engineer's Journey to Understand the Resilience of Cells"

Organisms are an evolutionary masterpiece of feedback control, featuring a mind boggling capacity to self-correct. Feedback loops enable cells to grow and then stop at the right size, to divide and self-repair, and to respond with agility to their changing environment. Individual cells engage in long range extracellular feedback with other cells, ensuring continued homeostasis of communities, tissues and organs. Many long ranging feedback loops, involving the nervous system, regulate vital physiological variables like hormone levels and temperature. Such elaborate multi-scale feedback structures underlie the remarkable resilience of living systems. But, they also underlie some of their most catastrophic and catastrophically counter-intuitive failure modes. In this talk, we showcase the dynamic anatomy of a few cellular feedback loops, highlight the technological advances that made these insights possible, and muse on the role biological feedback control—theory, computation and experimentation—as a cornerstone of a future where we can understand the intricate networks of life, then quantitatively predict and rationally correct their failures.

Event type: Generic UW Event
Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE):
-> http://www.washington.edu/maps/?KNE
Campus room: Kane 210
Event types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: UW Biology Department
More info: events.uw.edu…:
-> https://events.uw.edu/c/express/e394f6bb-4915-4f35-a7dd-17807b7aed9e