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PhD student lina.eckert at upf.edu

I am generally interested in extracting the fundamental principles by which complex webs of molecular interactions drive the behaviour of living organisms. In particular, I hope to understand how cells process information and make decisions using their gene regulatory, metabolic or signalling networks. Drawing on concepts from nonlinear dynamics and information theory, in my PhD project I explore how single cells can perform complex computations and accommodate different types of learning behaviours. I am a joint PhD student in the labs of Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena and Prof. Jordi Garcia Ojalvo. During my studies in Interdisciplinary Science at ETH Zürich I completed a Master's thesis with Jeremy and Prof. Rosa Martinez Corral when they were still at Harvard Medical School. In this project we explored how habituation, a non-associative form of learning, can be implemented on the basis of biochemical networks in a single cell, which led to this paper. Before moving to Barcelona, I worked with Prof. Aneta Koseska at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behaviour in Bonn. last updated on 25 March 2026

Professor jeremy.gunawardena at upf.edu

I used to be a very pure mathematician, an algebraic topologist, but fell from grace some years ago (to borrow Marc Kac's gracious way of putting it) when I was a Dickson Instructor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago. I volunteered to teach computer science, which made me interested in complexity, which eventually led to a long stint in industrial research at HP (Hewlett-Packard) Labs, where I ran part of the company's "blue skies" research programme. Post-genome systems biology brought complexity to centre stage and brought me to Harvard, to what was the Bauer Centre for Genomics Research at Harvard College and then to the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, where my lab studied cellular information processing using a combination of experiments and mathematical theory. I left Harvard to pursue new ideas about cellular learning. last updated on 5 March 2026

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