Simons Center for Quantitative Biology Archives | ��ϳԹ��Դ

Autism genetics: The faces behind the data

Margaret Osborne — Thu, 16 May 2024 11:30:35 +0000

More than 5.4 million adults in the U.S. have autism. That’s about the populations of Los Angeles and Phoenix combined. Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a developmental disability that affects how a person experiences the world around them. If this definition sounds broad, there’s a reason for that. Autism manifests in many different...

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On the passing of Jim Simons

Communications Department — Fri, 10 May 2024 18:42:59 +0000

It is with great sadness that we share with the ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) community the passing of Jim Simons, an Honorary Trustee and one of the most significant supporters of and donors to this institution. Jim was an award-winning mathematician, a legend in quantitative investing, and an inspired and generous philanthropist. Jim chaired...

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Smells like learning

Margaret Osborne — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 18:00:33 +0000

Order wine at a fancy restaurant, and the sommelier might describe its aroma as having notes of citrus, tropical fruit, or flowers. Yet, when you take a whiff, it might just smell like … wine. How can wine connoisseurs pick out such similar scents? ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and Salk...

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You say genome editing, I say natural mutation

Luis Sandoval — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 18:00:46 +0000

For tens of thousands of years, evolution shaped tomatoes through natural mutations. Then, humans came along. For centuries, we’ve bred and cherry-picked tomatoes with our preferred traits. Today, CRISPR genome editing allows us to make new crop mutations that improve traits even further. However, individual mutations, whether natural or engineered, don’t work alone. Each operates...

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Even fruit flies count

Margaret Osborne — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:30:26 +0000

Imagine sitting in your house when you hear a knock on your front door. You peer through the window and see a stranger outside. Almost immediately, your brain knows you’ve never encountered this person before. Maybe you feel scared and pretend you’re not home. Now instead of a stranger, imagine a close friend or family...

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Deciphering algorithms used by ants and the Internet

Eliene Augenbraun — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:01:49 +0000

Engineers sometimes turn to nature for inspiration. ��ϳԹ��Դ Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and research scientist Jonathan Suen found that adjustment algorithms—the same feedback control process by which the Internet optimizes data traffic—are used by several natural systems to sense and stabilize behavior, including ant colonies, cells, and neurons. Internet engineers route data...

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Making AI algorithms show their work

Luis Sandoval — Thu, 13 May 2021 18:00:23 +0000

Artificial intelligence (AI) learning machines can be trained to solve problems and puzzles on their own instead of using rules that we made for them. But often, researchers do not know what rules the machines make for themselves. ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Assistant Professor Peter Koo developed a new method that quizzes a machine-learning...

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How a bad day at work led to better COVID predictions

Jasmine Lee — Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:51 +0000

Talking about your bad day at work could lead to great solutions. ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and his wife, Dr. Sejal Morjaria, an infectious disease physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), found a way to predict COVID-19 severity in cancer patients. The computational tool they developed prevents unnecessary...

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AI researchers ask: What’s going on inside the black box?

Jasmine Lee — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:00:55 +0000

��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Assistant Professor Peter Koo and collaborator Matt Ploenzke reported a way to train machines to predict the function of DNA sequences. They used “neural nets,” a type of artificial intelligence (AI) typically used to classify images. Teaching the neural net to predict the function of short stretches of DNA allowed...

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How to tune out common odors and focus on important ones

Brian Stallard — Mon, 11 May 2020 19:00:27 +0000

“Imagine a dog playing in a garden and smelling all of these different flowery smells, and then somewhere in the distance a predator appears, like a fox. The raw input coming into the dog’s nose is a smell that consists of something like 90% flowers and only five or 10% of this predator,” CSHL Associate...

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A science career path: David McCandlish

Brian Stallard — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 13:00:19 +0000

His interdisciplinary research began by reading a book. hen you see his office, with books stacked from floor to ceiling and papers strewn across desks, it’s clear that David McCandlish is an avid reader. As an assistant professor and quantitative biologist at CSHL, McCandlish endeavors to stay up to date on the newest and greatest...

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What Google could learn from a fruit fly

Communications Department — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 20:35:40 +0000

By tapping into life’s algorithms, scientists are finding elegant solutions to some of the hardest problems in computer science. Let’s say you’re at a big office party full of people, both coworkers and strangers, when someone walks up to you. You have a split second to determine if you know this person or not; you...

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Saket Navlakha taps the power of biology and computers

Brian Stallard — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 14:00:52 +0000

Associate Professor Saket Navlakha, the newest researcher to join the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL), focuses his work on what he calls the “algorithms of nature,” which are based on how molecules, cells, and organisms process information to solve problems important to their survival. By learning how the biology...

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The Lab partners with award-winning magazine

Communications Department — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:49:56 +0000

We were as excited as new-world explorers when we launched Nautilus in 2013. We knew science magazines before us were content to report on the latest novel research and leave it at that. But we were after something more. We wanted to introduce readers to scientists doing the most fascinating research in myriad fields around...

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Research profile: Adam Siepel

Brian Stallard — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 15:34:23 +0000

In the mid-1980s, a rural hamlet called West Valley in upstate New York had a 13-year-old guru named Adam Siepel. A surprising number of folks knew who he was, or at least as surprising as that can be in a tight-knit community of just over 500 people. Locals would seek him out to teach them,...

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Peter Koo wants to understand how machines learn biology

Charlotte Hu — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 13:00:59 +0000

The science world is sitting at the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution that impacts applications such as speech recognition and computer vision. Peter Koo is on the front line of those changes. As ��ϳԹ��Դ’s new Assistant Professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Koo will explore how AI integrates with...

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Hannah Meyer joins CSHL Quantitative Biology faculty

Sara Roncero-Menendez — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 19:30:00 +0000

��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) is pleased to welcome Hannah Meyer to the faculty as a Quantitative Biology Fellow. Meyer’s current work examines how T cells, which are critical to the body’s immune system, are educated within the thymus gland to distinguish between self and non-self during their development, so that they will ultimately react...

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How does math help us understand the brain?

Sara Roncero-Menendez — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 21:45:39 +0000

We’ve all learned about math in school. For many of us, it calls to mind exercises like bisecting geometric shapes and cracking algebraic equations. But what does math have to do with researching the brain? Computational neuroscientists like ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Assistant Professor Tatiana Engel use math to better understand how networks in...

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The big problem of small data: A new approach

Brian Stallard — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 16:00:14 +0000

Cold Spring Harbor, NY — Big Data is all the rage today, but Small Data matters too! Drawing reliable conclusions from small datasets, like those from clinical trials for rare diseases or in studies of endangered species, remains one of the trickiest obstacles in statistics. Now, ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) researchers have developed a...

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Evolving sets of gene regulators explain some of our differences from other primates

Peter Tarr — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 16:00:41 +0000

Cold Spring Harbor, NY — Today, biologists add an important discovery to a growing body of data explaining why we’re different from chimps and other primate relatives, despite the remarkable similarity of our genes. The new evidence has to do with the way genes are regulated. It’s the result of a comprehensive genome-wide computational analysis...

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Simons Center for Quantitative Biology Archives | ���ϳԹ���Դ