Marc Birtwistle

Dr. Birtwistle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics and the Systems Biology Center New York.
Dr. Birtwistle is formally trained as a chemical engineer, and thus knowledgeable in a wide array of quantitative methods for mathematical modeling of physicochemical processes. During his doctoral work, he applied such methods to understanding cancer as a disease of deregulated control systems, particularly, the ErbB signaling network, which is dysfunctional in many types of human cancer. Such a so-called integrative systems biology approach focuses not on how individual genes and proteins affect the signaling network, but rather on how the connectivity between and states of players in the network create biological function, or in the case of cancer, disease. During this doctoral and consequently postdoctoral experience, Dr. Birtwistle was also trained as an experimental cell and molecular biologist to complement the quantitative modeling background, and thus brings an interdisciplinary approach to cancer research.
More info: http://www.mountsinai.org/profiles/marc-birtwistle