Multicellular Information Processing

Living tissues are among nature’s most sophisticated information-processing systems. Their multicellular organization creates capabilities unavailable to individual cells: information can propagate across space, be distributed among specialized cell types, and be integrated collectively to coordinate tissue-level behaviors. Our lab seeks to uncover and compare the principles by which multicellular systems solve diverse information-processing problems. We do so by reconstructing multicellular systems synthetically and quantitatively interrogating information processing in native tissues. Our long-term goal is to move from describing multicellular behavior to predicting and ultimately programming it.