Making It All Compute

By Danielle LaVaque-Manty

Instead of test tubes, Petri dishes, or a synchrotron, Noah Rosenberg's lab has an electronic white board and a room full of computers.

Since high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Rosenberg has been interested in both mathematics and biology. As an undergraduate math major at Rice University, he participated in a behavioral ecology project that developed mathematical models in order to understand the evolution of social behavior in wasps.

He went on to complete an MS in math and PhD in biology at Stanford, combining these fields to work on mathematical models of evolution and genetics. "There are applications of math in all kinds of different areas of biology," he says, "and those seemed most interesting to me."

Programs like the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the University of Michigan, in which Rosenberg now teaches, were unusual while he was going through school. These days, "there's a bit more recognition of interests that overlap math and biology, and students have more options."

The UM was a natural fit for him because there are so many research programs in areas connected to what his lab works on, "which makes this a good place for interdisciplinary work," and the Life Sciences Institute has been instrumental in helping to maintain his computer-intensive lab. "We've had excellent computing support from the LSI IT staff."

In addition to his position at the LSI, Rosenberg holds appointments in four other departments or programs—Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Human Genetics—spanning three different colleges.

Does he ever feel stretched thin? "Not so much. It's good to be able to draw students from each of the different disciplines."

At the moment, his lab employs students and postdocs from Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Human Genetics. "With different backgrounds and interests, the people in the lab complement each other very well."

This group is currently juggling several projects. Mathematical modeling studies of species divergence can help in reconstructing evolutionary trees, while studies of patterns of worldwide genetic variation can help illuminate human evolutionary history and aid in the development of statistical approaches for identifying disease genes.

One project uses genetics to examine the historical spread of the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy plant. As a result, he jokes, "I'm noticing a lot of diversity among the weed species in my backyard."

Rosenberg's lab is also collaborating with Israeli institutions on a study of the genetic relationships of populations within Israel, and he and LSI colleague Alex Kondrashov teach a yearly "Camp Evolution" mini-course at Ben Gurion University to Israeli graduate students.

His research on the genetic structure of human populations recently received a mention in the New York Times, but he shrugs off the attention. The article referred to work from 5 years ago, which has been "quite exciting, due to all the different paths it has led us to pursue."

Rosenberg received a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship in biological informatics in 2002, a five-year Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Career Award in the biomedical sciences in 2004, and a Sloan Research Fellowship in computational and evolutionary molecular biology in 2006.