Image of a combinatorial gene regulation

Higher-order interactions

Complex networks are everywhere, and commonly represented as graphs of nodes with interactions. Why graphs? Why restrict interactions to pairwise? Combinatorial and higher-order dependence structures are ubiquitous in Nature, and I’m interested in how to use them to understand complex systems.



Stator: Higher-order genetic interactions and cells states

I study the role of higher-order interactions in particular in biomedicine, and developed a method called Stator to use such higher-order interactions among molecules to identify new cell states hiding in single-cell transcriptomic data sets. Here, we used this to find future fates of embryonic neurons, and liver cancer states that are prognostic of patient survival. Image of a combinatorial gene regulation



Interactions and information theory

I’ve also shown how such higher-order interactions are centrally located in the landscape of higher-order information theory. Currently, I’m a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, where I look at the role of higher-order information theory in other complex systems, such as n-qubit quantum circuits.

Image of a combinatorial gene regulation