Our Mission

The mission of QBio at Yale is to develop predictive and quantitative explanations for the structure and behavior of biological systems.

The big idea: Biology has evolved robust and efficient systems to solve the many problems encountered by organisms, which include many also encountered by humans. For instance, organisms must optimally distribute resources under constraints, make decisions under uncertainty, and coordinate behavior across many agents. We want to understand how those biological solutions work, quantitatively. By their nature, mathematical descriptions abstract away details of specific biological systems, which makes them amenable to identifying functional principles across systems. Our goal is to uncover the principles behind these biological solutions so they can inform the design of new biological systems and help address challenges beyond biology.

We are driven by and acquire quantitative data describing the dynamics and organization of biological systems, from bacteria to the brain. We adopt experimental methods and approaches from physics and engineering to probe and characterize these systems. We describe and predict system behavior using mathematical models and techniques from many disciplines, including physics, engineering, computer science, and machine learning/AI. Using these tools, we aim to investigate the principles of operation for biological systems over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales: from molecular, through cells and tissues, to organisms, populations and ecosystems. Ultimately, we aim to deepen our understanding of fundamental biology to enable the manipulation of existing systems and the engineering of new, robust systems inspired by biological principles.