People

Dr. William Holmes is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics, and an Associate Director of the Quantitative Systems Biology Center at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in the application of quantitative, computational, and mathematical methods to describe and study problems stemming from life and social sciences. He works at the interface of cellular systems biology and mathematics. He works to detail and understand the mechanisms responsible for highly choreographed spatio temporal regulation of cellular processes such as chemotaxis (movement of a cell in response to a chemical gradient), cytokinesis (cell division), wound regeneration, and embryonic development. In short, this work involves constructing descriptive models (typically ODE, PDE, or discrete stochastic models) of biological processes, studying their properties, and connecting results of those investigations to the motivating systems to suggest targeted experiments and hopefully provide new insights.