Training Program in Biological Feedback Control

Feedback control is ubiquitous across biological systems: it provides robustness to uncertainty in the environment, enables adaptation, and can alter the speed or stability of a system’s response. Rapid advances in experimental methods, computational power, and control theory are now creating unprecedented opportunities in the emerging field of biological control, where investigators seek to establish principles for the design and control of biological systems arising from a growing convergence between the engineering principles of feedback control and the diverse array of self-regulating systems in biology.

Students pursuing modern research questions in biological systems are often not trained to quantitatively analyze feedback mechanisms. In cases where students are exposed to these techniques, they must contend with control theory that was developed for traditional engineered systems and is not well-suited for the study of biological systems in which sensors and actuators are commonly integrated, interwoven systems are operating at multiple time scales, and nonlinear effects are often exploited rather than suppressed.

At the same time, current theory in feedback control is too limited to capture complexities that are uniquely biological. Because biological systems can contain millions of cells, opportunities for parallelized computation, diversification, and specialization exist that are unrivaled in traditional engineered systems. Understanding and controlling the remarkable abilities of native biological systems, and creating new systems empowered with these abilities, could revolutionize how we study and engineer many aspects of our world.

The Graduate Training Program in Biological Feedback Control is an NSF-funded Research Traineeship (NRT) that will equip PhD students with the knowledge and skills needed to decipher the rules of biological feedback control and to harness those rules to control and synthesize natural, engineered, and biohybrid systems. Students will be trained in methods for modeling feedback control, analyzing how biological systems implement control in natural contexts, and identifying opportunities for novel designs.

With support from:

NSF DGE #2244366