Personal profile in our Scientific Output Portal (PPC)  

Research lines

Our lab is interested in the dynamics of living systems, from unicellular organisms to human beings. We use dynamical phenomena to identify the molecular mechanisms of cellular processes, such as decision making in bacteria, spatial self-organization in bacterial biofilms, and pluripotency and tissue homeostasis in stem cells. Using a combination of theoretical modeling and experimental tools that include time-lapse fluorescence microscopy and microfluidics, we investigate dynamical phenomena such as biochemical pulses and oscillations, and study how multiple instances of these processes coexist inside the cell in a coordinated way. We also model the time-varying response of the immune system to cytokine signaling, at the level of both single cells and cellular populations. At a larger level of organization, we use conductance-based neural models to explain the emergence of collective rhythms in cortical networks, and explore the functional uses of such rhythms for neuronal communication purposes. We also work on developing a global description of brain activity by means of mesoscopic neural-mass models, which allow us to link the structural properties of brain networks with their function. Finally, we apply the knowledge gained from these studies in systems neuroscience to investigate the computational abilities of single cells within a systems biology perspective.