Walter Fontana
Models as a way of reasoning about biology
The challenge of systems biology is not only experimental in kind. It also is the challenge of reasoning about facts that are rapidly evolving while remaining highly fragmented across research communities. I see a fundamental role for models as reasoning instruments in biology. Models, not databases as we know them today, will become the main vehicles for the computer-assisted storage, communication, and retrieval of biological knowledge. Computer scientists and I have joined forces with several other researchers to design a computational environment that represents biological knowledge, as it pertains to signaling, in an editable and executable fashion. This instrument will lend itself to the collaborative construction and critique of models.
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Trained as a chemist, mentored in theoretical molecular biology by Peter Schuster (Vienna), educated in evolutionary biology by Leo Buss (Yale), self-taught in computer science and charmed by the social sciences through John Padgett (Chicago), Walter has straddled many divides and taken risks in pursuing a professional trajectory shaped by the desire for a broadly engaging cross-disciplinary environment more than by career safety. He moved from the Santa Fe Institute to Harvard Medical School in September 2004. In seeing the opportunities that quantitative thinking and technology bring to experimental biology, the Fontana Lab pursued a theoretical and an experimental agenda that were deliberately distinct from each other. Having achieved a significant experimental milestone, the lab returned to all-computational and theoretical research in 2017
Check out Walter’s website here