Office
(631) 632-5414
Email
gabor.balázsi@stonybrook.edu
Stony Brook University
115C Laufer Center
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5252
Gábor Balázsi, PhD
Henry Laufer Professor, The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology and
Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Stony Brook University
Research Program
Imaging, Biomarker Discovery and Engineering SciencesDepartments
The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology and
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Research Interest
The goal of my laboratory is to develop a predictive, quantitative understanding of biological processes such as cellular decision making and the survival and evolution of cell populations. We have been pursuing two main research directions:
(1) computational modeling of natural gene regulatory networks and
(2) designing, building and experimentally characterizing synthetic gene circuits.
Our current goal is to merge these two efforts, and use synthetic gene circuits as perturbation tools to understand how gene regulatory networks control cells and cell populations.
In the past, we mapped gene regulatory network responses to environmental changes; we showed how nongenetic cellular diversity can aid cell survival and mediate drug resistance; we built various synthetic gene circuits to control nongenetic cellular variability; we built “dimmer” or “linearizer” gene circuits for precise gene expression tuning; we developed computational models of natural and synthetic gene regulatory networks affecting drug resistance and metastasis; and we have confirmed computational predictions of evolutionary dynamics by experimental evolution of cells carrying synthetic gene circuits, bridging the fields of synthetic and evolutionary biology. Now we are ready to interface natural gene networks with synthetic gene circuits to study how controlling gene network dynamics affects cellular phenotypes in cancer and drug resistance.
Education
Ph.D. - Physics, University of Missouri at Saint Louis & Missouri S&T at Rolla, USA, 2001M.S. - Physics, University of Missouri at Saint Louis, USA, 1999
M.S. - Magnetism, Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania, 1997
B.S. - Physics, Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania, 1996