Phenotypic Switching

Dr. Herbert Levine is Hasselmman Professor in Bioengineering at Rice University. He is also the co-director of Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontier Center devoted to applying concepts and methods from physical sciences to complex biological and biomedical problems. He is also the coordinator of an international research network of researchers in the Physics of Living Systems, under the auspices of the NSF Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) initiative. Dr. Levine did his undergraduate work at MIT, and received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1979. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and a position on the research staff of the corporate research lab of Schlumberger Inc., he was appointed in 1987 to the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. He rose to the ranks of distinguished professor before leaving in 2012 to accept his new post at Rice. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Mohit Kumar Jolly obtained his B.Tech. and M. Tech. in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur, India, and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Rice University, working at the interface of systems biology and cancer biology. After a short stint as independent postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Cancer Biology, he joined the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, as an Assistant Professor. His work focuses on integrating mechanism-based mathematical models with experiments and clinical data to elucidate the mechanisms of cancer metastasis and therapy resistance. He won the 2016 iBiology Young Scientist Seminar Series – a coveted award for communicating one’s research to diverse audience. Dr. Prakash Kulkarni is a Research Professor at the City of Hope National Medical Centre. After receiving his PhD in biochemistry from India, he completed his postdoctoral training in cell biology at New York University School of Medicine. He began his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor of urology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, from where he moved to the protein biophysics laboratory at the Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research at the University of Maryland, prior to taking up is current position. Prior to Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kulkarni held Staff Scientist positions in chemistry and biology at the California Institute of Technology, and in genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine. His main research interests are understanding how conformational dynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) contributes to non-genetic mechanisms underlying disease pathology and heterogeneity in cancer. Dr. Vidyanand Nanjundiah is an Honorary Professor in the Center for Human Genetics, Bengaluru. He earned his BS from the University of Bombay and PhD from the University of Chicago. He held post-doctoral positions at the Hubrecht Laboratorium Utrecht, The Netherlands, Max-Planck-Institut Tubingen, Germany, and Biozentrum, Basel, Switzerland. He began his career as an Assistant Professor and rose to the rank of Professor at the Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He has been a member of the Molecular Biology Unit, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Bombay; Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics and Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. He is an elected member of the Indian National Science Academy.

1. The fundamentals of phenotypic plasticity

2. Rethinking the role of chance in the explanation of cell differentiation

3. Random walk across the epigenetic landscape

4. Maneuvering protein functions and functional levels by structural excursions

5. Prion-mediated phenotypic diversity in fungi

6. Bistability in virus - host interaction networks underlies the succes of hepatitis C treatments

7. Quantifyinh Waddington landscapes, paths, and kinetics of cell fate decision making of differentiation/development

8. The physics of cell fate

9. Disentangling the environmentally induced and stochastic development components of phenotypic variation

10. The evolution of cell differentiation in animals: biomolecular condensates as amplification hubs of inherent cell functions

11. Phenotypic switching and its evolutionary consequences

12. Cell-state organization by exploratory sloppy dynamics

13. Emergence of metabolic heterogeneity in cell populations: lessons from budding yeast

14. Stochastic phenotypic switching in endothelial cell heterogeneity

15. Regulation of phenotypic plasticity from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology

16. Phenotypic plasticity and the origins of novelty

17. Niche construction and the transition to herbivory: Phenotype switching and the organization of new nutritional modes

18. NAture, nurture, and noise in bird song ontogeny as determinants of phenotypic and functional variation among dialects

19. Domestication as a process generating phenotypic diversity

20. The glycobiology of ovarian cnacer progression: phenotypic switches an microenvironmental influences

21.Epithelia-mesenchymal transition in cancer

22. Phenotypic switching and prostate diseases: a model proposing a causal link benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostate cancer

23. Phenotypic plasticty and lineage switching in prostate cancer

24. Implications of non-genetic heterogeneity in cancer drug resistance and malignant progression

25. Phenotypic plasticity: the emergence of cancer stem cells and collective cell migration

26. Adaptive phenotypic switching in breast cancer in response to matric deprivation

27. Phenotypic instability induced by tissue disuption at the origin of cancer

28. Evolutionary strategies to overcome cancer cell resistance ot treatment