Research

Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, we use a wide range of natural animal models as well as create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. A driving principle is the search for unification: invariant, scale-free principles for intelligence behavior in unfamiliar guises. We are interested in the physics of sentience, and the sentience of physics. We study cells, and cell groups as a collective intelligence, navigating diverse problem spaces such astranscriptional, physiological, and anatomical morphospace. We characterize and model the various competencies of this process, including its evolutionary origins and the implications it has for the evolutionary process itself. Much of our focus is on the control of anatomical growth and form, but we also study decision-making and problem-solving in transcriptional and protein pathways and physiological circuits. We want to understand the robust reliability of default morphogenesis, and the behavior-shaping interfaces that evolut

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