Introduction
Ben is a Research Associate in Therapeutic Science at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School. His research is at the intersection of systems biology, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, and aims to understand how biological cells work and react to drugs and environmental signals using computational approaches. Ben developed INDRA, a software tool which automatically assembles biochemical mechanisms extracted from the scientific literature into explanatory models. He is also working on a human-machine communication system which allows scientists to interact with a computer partner to construct and test hypotheses about molecular systems. Ben obtained his Ph.D. in computational systems biology from the National University of Singapore.
News
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I was awarded the DARPA Young Faculty Award (https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/for-universities/young-faculty-award) for 2020-2022
(https://hms.harvard.edu/news/awards-recognitions-august-2020) - Our paper on the INDRA Interactive Pathway Map is now out, visit http://pathwaymap.indra.bio to try it out and check out the Twitter tutorial with videos.
- I recently gave a talk in the Stanford Center for Cancer Systems Biology seminar series: http://ccsb.stanford.edu/events/seminars/2019-seminars.html
- My recent invited talk at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjRSCE3towM
- I am on the conference committee of the Modeling the World's Systems 2019 conference, accepting submissions until February 1, 2019
- I'm co-PI on our project to build an Ecosystem of Machine-maintained Models with Automated Analysis (EMMAA) which was awarded in November 2018 under the DARPA Automating Scientific Knowledge Extraction program, the first of DARPA's Artificial Intelligence Exploration programs. See http://emmaa.indra.bio.
- In October 2018 I gave a keynote talk at the Integrative Pathway Modelling in Systems Biology and Systems Medicine conference in Germany: http://www.integrative-pathway-models.de/meetings/income2018-conference-...
- I was selected as a DARPA Riser to participate in DARPA's 60th anniversary Symposium (DARPA60) in Sept 2018, National Harbor, MD. I presented "Model-building machines that monitor, understand, and explain complex systems at scale".
- In May 2018 I was an invited speaker at the Modeling the World's Systems conference in Pittsburgh and gave a tutorial on automated model assembly with INDRA
- An intro video for our paper "From word models to executable models of signaling networks using automated assembly" is now available at: https://vimeo.com/265004298