What we do:
Research in the Perkins lab spans bioinformatics, computational biology, mathematical biology and machine learning. Our lab is located in the Sprott Center for Stem Cell Research at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (www.ohri.ca). The Sprott Center is one of the top stem cell research centers in Canada, and one of the top muscle stem cell centers in the world. We do some basic theoretical and computational research, especially in the areas of dynamical and/or stochastic model fitting for molecular biological systems. We also work with a number of collaborators to analyze data and model specific biological systems, especially stem cell differentiation dynamics and gene regulatory networks in a variety of normal and diseased cell types. We also have pet interests in understanding information processing strategies exhibited by cells and their molecular implementations, and in high throughput drug screening. More generally, members of the Perkins lab are interested in machine learning and statistical applications in molecular biology and health research.
Lab news:
"Estimating the Stochastic Bifurcation Structure of Cellular Networks" has just appeared in PLoS Computational Biology [Access On-Line] (Mar 2010)
"A trade-off between sample complexity and computational complexity in learning Boolean networks from time-series data" has just appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics [Access Online] (Feb 2010)
"Maximum likelihood trajectories for continuous-time Markov chains" appeared at NIPS-09 [Access Online] (Dec 2009)
"Strategies for Cellular Decision Making", coauthored with Peter Swain, has just appeared in Molecular Systems Biology [Access Online] (Nov 2009)
Recruitment: Dr. Perkins is presently recruiting students / fellows at all levels, from undergraduate to postdoctoral. If you are interested in joining the lab, send email to Dr. Perkins at tperkins@ohri.ca (ongoing)