Claus Kadelka, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, recently received a research award from the Mathematical Biology Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), starting this September.
The Mathematical Biology Program supports research in all areas of mathematical sciences with relevance to the biological sciences. Successful proposals must demonstrate mathematical innovation, biological relevance and significance, and strong integration between mathematics and biology. Claus will receive $487,608 over the course of the next three years to study canalization and other design principles of gene regulatory network models.
Claus specializes in mathematical biology, a field at the interface of multiple disciplines: mathematics, biology, statistics and computer science. By combining data science with rigorous theoretical and computational analysis, Claus studies gene regulatory networks, which govern our cellular decision-making. Specifically, he aims to identify mechanisms which confer robustness to these networks, by relating network topology to the network dynamics. In another NSF-funded project, which started last November, Claus focuses on the mechanism of modularity. In this project, he focuses on the mechanism of canalization.