Cameron Ray Smith
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| Complex Systems Summer School 2012 |
Hello! I am looking forward to meeting everyone in Santa Fe. I am excited to hear about everyone's research and to have the opportunity to work on a project that might be a seed for future collaboration. One short story is that I'm interested in evolution, network science, mathematics, computer science, and language.
A longer story is that in light of an internal struggle that I believe has explicitly confronted thinkers, at the least since Kant, my approach to research teeters about the fulcrum between rationalism and empiricism with respect to the order in which each is applied in attempts to cultivate knowledge.
My scientific research interests began with synthetic biology and the study of bacterial quorum sensing and broadened from there to include systems biology and the evolution of multicellularity. I am now primarily interested in applying, as yet abstract, tools from mathematics and theoretical computer science to a mereological description of the evolution of hierarchical organization in biological systems that incorporates niche construction with selection in order to derive a more concrete computational model of such. In this context, and being at least a token ontological reductionist, I am also interested in the hierarchical relationship between information representation in molecular and linguistic forms as may be addressed at the level of abstraction of semiotics.
Despite my affinity for abstraction, I have attempted to ground myself to "real" data via collaborations with developmental biologists in the study of genetic regulation of the cellular differentiation process associated with hematopoiesis, immunologists in the study of synergistic interactions between neutralizing and enhancing antibodies to the anthrax toxin, cell biologists in the study of Holliday junction formation and resolution during meiosis, and cancer biologists in the study of gene expression variability in a mouse model of colon cancer.