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Master's student 2022

I am a student in interdisciplinary science at ETH Zürich, joining the lab to work on my Master's thesis. During my bachelor's degree I focused on biology and chemistry. But soon I realised that physics and mathematics are invaluable tools to investigate the fundamental mechanisms of life. My program in interdisciplinary science allows me to pursue these diverse interests and provides me with the perfect background for my current work in Systems Biology. My project in the lab is about habituation — one of the simplest forms of learning. Supervised by Rosa Martinez-Corral, and building on previous work by Ziyuan Zhao, I am trying to develop a theoretical model based on biologically plausible mechanisms which can reproduce the main characteristics of habituation observed not only in higher organisms but notably in in single cells, too. Since I have always been curious about the interceptions of natural science with other scientific disciplines, I am very happy that this project makes me contemplate not only about the behaviour of mathematical models, but also about cognitive science and the phenomenon of learning itself. Lina's Master Thesis can be found here. last updated on 21 November 2022

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 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 join Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, to pursue new ideas about cellular learning. last updated on 5 March 2026

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