Dr Ekkehard Ullner - University of Aberdeen

Ekkehard’s research involves applying physical methods to understand the role of ‘noise’ in biological systems. He investigates cell‐to‐cell communication in synthetic genetic networks and deduced numerical simulations of repressilator models with repressive cell-to‐cell communication.

 

He is interested in phenomena where noise plays a constructive role in the signal response or signal transmission and his focus is on the appearance of artificial differentiation in the assembly of identical cells, and the roles of multi‐stability and multi‐rhythmicity in the robustness of a system. 

 

Ekkehard is interested in the influence of noise on the functions of the circadian rhythm and his models use the collective dynamics of numerous coupled genetic oscillators in the central pacemaker area of the brain.

 

Ekkehard received his Ph.D. from the University of Potsdam in 2004 and his first post-doc position was at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems Dresden. He gained a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with a two‐year research stay at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and since March 2009 has held a SULSA lectureship in Systems Biology at the University of Aberdeen.

 

For more information click here.