Research

Overview

I conduct research at the interface of biology and engineering to create and apply new experimental and computational methods to probe complex biological systems and develop new pharmacological therapies.

Tools

Microfluidics

Most of my work heavily relies on the development of microfluidic approaches, which greatly facilitate animal handling and provide unprecedented control of the experimental interventions. Specifically, I have developed a series of microfluidics platforms to deliver controlled external cues such as mechanical, chemical and/or temperature stimuli to a worm while monitoring neuronal responses. The platforms not only greatly enhance the throughput and robustness of experiments and but also allow to deliver combinations of various stimuli which was not possible using conventional methods. With these platforms, I studied the functional role of sensory and interneurons during developmental and adult animals and identified the neuropeptides that modulate arousal and cross-modal sensitization. Currently, I am developing a microfluidic-based cell sorting platform to enrich rare senescence cells based on their morphological and physiological characteristics.

Computer Vision

Most of my work relies on quantitative analysis of image-based readouts. To take advantage of images, I have extracted biological meaningful behavioral and morphological features to build a phenotypic profile that is able to describe the healthy state of animals. To do this, I have developed custom image processing algorithms based on both traditional and deep learning approaches.

Machine Learning

To predict the healthy state of animals using the extracted phenotypic profiles, I used the machine learning approach. For example, in Daphnia, I built a ML model to estimate animals’ phenotypic age and use it to evaluate the efficacy of various drugs and chemicals.