Modular Software and Modular Biology
Herbert Sauro
Keck Graduate Institute
2:00 PM -- 3:00 PM
June 2, 2006 (Friday)
Beckman Inst. Auditorium
Modularity is a key concept that pervades both software engineering and biological systems. In this talk I will discuss two things: the Systems Biology Workbench (SBW), which is an extensible and modular software framework for systems biology, and modularity in biological networks. I will discuss strategies for searching for functional motifs in networks, including work we have done in the evolution of in silico functional motifs.
About the speaker
Herbert Sauro was originally educated as a biochemist/microbiologist but became interested in the use of simulation and theory to understand cellular networks after accidently coming across a paper by David Garkfinkel on the simulation of glycolysis. He wrote one of the first biochemical simulators for the PC (SCAMP) in the 1980s in order to assist work on extending metabolic control analysis (A theory closely related to biochemical systems theory). However, with the lack of community interest in systems biology during the late 80s and early 90s, he left science to start a software company and offer consultancy work to finance firms in the UK. With the surge in interest in systems biology in the US in the late 90s, he secured a position at Caltech to assist in the devleopment of the Systems Biology Markup Language. Since then he moved to a faculty position at the Keck Graduate Institute where he continues to do research on network motifs, theory and software.