From the Director:

Thank you for your interest in the Doctoral Program in Systems Biology and Physiology, and welcome to our site. Our program is evolving and growing in new ways to meet the needs and aspirations of its students and faculty. There is widespread interest and enthusiasm for biology in the new ?post-genomic era.? This program will equip its graduates to be successful participants and leaders in research and teaching.

The tabulation of genome sequences, including the human genome, and the consequences of large-scale, ubiquitous computing power are changing the potential for biological research. Physiology has always been the central biological discipline that addresses questions of function in complex systems, and this new interface between biological function and new technologies is the focus of our program.

Most simply, Physiology is the science that concerns itself with functions of living organisms . More particularly Physiology seeks explanations for biological functions on the basis of underlying macromolecular, chemical, and physical properties. In the end, Physiological experiments and theories provide explanations for how basic physical entities (molecules) interact to yield the extraordinary complexity we observe in a living organism. Questions about biological functions may be approached at the cellular and subcellular levels or at higher levels of organs, organisms, and groups of interacting individuals. The physiologist concerns him/herself explicitly with dynamic living organisms. In a university there are faculty and students in many departments with different names but regardless of departmental affiliation, Physiologists are defined by the scientific questions they ask and the methodologies and concepts they use

Physiology is unique in Biology in that it is concerned with higher level concepts like systems and theories. Physiology is very different from anatomy, cell biology, biochemistry, development, genetics, or molecular biology, where the subject matters are defined by their physical characteristics. Physiology uses all these disciplines to discover functional explanations, which are human abstractions to explain the biological world. Correspondingly, most researchers who identify themselves with other biological disciplines are ultimately interested in discovering theories that explain biological functions; that is: Physiology.

Familiarly, systems biology is based on our ability to identify complex interacting ensembles of molecules, cells, and organs, which have traditionally been defined as systems (cardiovascular system, nervous system, endocrine system, etc.). Less familiarly systems biology is a new discipline that provides new insights both from, and about, the tides of new data from techniques like expression phenotyping, genome sequencing, interaction mapping, metabolic phenotyping, and all the other experimental approaches that take advantage of large scale computing power for gathering biological data. The traditional approaches for making physiological inferences are clearly not up to the task of interpreting all these new kinds of data. Likewise, simply collecting more data faster, or using analytical methods borrowed from engineering and physics will be insufficient. Systems Biology will inevitably develop by incorporating methods and concepts from other disciplines, and by discovering and inventing it's own new methods and concepts.

Science in general seeks to discover theories and concepts that reliably predict the behavior of the natural world. For Biology, this means providing explanations for the behavior of complex, self-reproducing systems constrained by basic physical and chemical laws, and by evolutionary history. Systems Biology and Physiology has the goal of using the most modern and powerful analytical tools, combined with experiments focused on normal functions and pathologies. In our program there is a strong inclination towards questions that relate to health and disease. Our focus areas are Computation Biology and Physiological Genomics, Cardiovascular Systems Physiology, Reproductive Biology, Epithelial Biology, Metabolic and Stress Coping Systems, and Signal Transduction Systems. Our faculty members have overlapping interests in these areas. Coursework, seminars, and outside speakers provide instruction in all these topics.

We invite you to join us in these exciting endeavors, with an enthusiasm for all the opportunities inherent in this program.