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Sie sind hier: FRIAS School of Life Sciences … Wissenschaftliche … Sebastian Weber

Sebastian Weber

Theoretical Polymerphysics
Postdoc with Junior Fellow Hauke Busch

CV

Sebastian Weber was born in Berlin, Germany, on February 18, 1980. After graduating from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2005 with a diploma in Physics, he began his dissertation work under the supervision of Prof. M. Porto. In December 2008 he received his doctoral degree with the dissertation "Structure and Dynamics of Networks". From January 2009 on he worked at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) in the school of soft matter as a postdoctoral fellow of Prof. J. Klafter. The research project at the FRIAS with Prof. J. Klafter has been focusing on the modeling of proteins as fractal structures by means of random walks. At the FRIAS he met Junior Fellow Dr. H. Busch head of the Cell Control Communication (CCC) group with whom he started collaborating. Since July 2010 Sebastian Weber joined the CCC group with the aim to further progress started projects and perform network analysis of gene regulatory networks.



FRIAS Project

Project I

The Gerontosys project aims to improve the understanding of skin aging processes. The project will in an initial step setup a standardized cell database which consist of skin cells samples taken from humans of different ages. Then the cells activities will be inferred using micro-array techniques in order to identify the underlying gene regulatory network. Of particular interest are the differences between these gene regulatory networks from cells of different age.
Project II

The gene regulatory network of a living cell controls and regulates cell processes by a manifold of signaling pathways. The determination of their structure and understanding of their dynamics has become a major task nowadays. This challenge is hindered by the sheer complexity in terms of size and the diversity of interactions to be experimentally determined. We investigate here the question how the details of the gene regulatory network matter for signal propagation. Of major interest is the dependence of the signal propagation on network topology, size, and if a detailed knowledge of kinetic interaction rates is required for an appropriate modeling of the gene regulatory network dynamics. Using artificially generated networks, we find that the network topology itself already heavily dominates network dynamics. This promises to greatly simplify proper modeling by theory and relaxes experimental efforts required.

 

Selected Publications

  • Weber, S. and Porto, M. Multicomponent reaction-diffusion processes on complex networks. Phys. Rev. E, 74:046108, 2006.
  • Pusch, A., Weber, S., and Porto, M. Impact of topology on the dynamical organization of cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma game. Phys. Rev. E, 77:036120, 2008
  • Weber, S., Hütt, M.-T., and Porto, M. Pattern formation and efficiency of reaction-diffusion processes on complex networks. Europhys. Lett., 82(2):28003, 2008