Tom Michoel

Tom Michoel studied physics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and University College Dublin and received his PhD in Mathematical Physics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He obtained a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders to carry out research at the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis (2001-2002) and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2002-2004). With continued support from the Research Foundation Flanders he switched to the field of computational biology, working at the Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB and Ghent University, where he became a Senior Researcher (2007) and Expert Scientist (2010).

Mathematical modeling of disease-perturbed networks using genome-scale data

Systems biology is the study of dynamic networks of interacting elements (DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites) with the purpose of understanding biological processes at a system level rather than a component-by-component level. High-throughput experimental technologies now enable to obtain genome-scale networks of molecular interactions and to measure the functional activity of genes and proteins under spatial, temporal or genotypic variation. In this project we will integrate various sources of genome-scale data to investigate how disease and other processes critically affect normal network structures and how the dynamics of perturbed networks explains biological functioning at a system level.

Selected Publications

1. A. Joshi, Y. Beck, T. Michoel: Post-transcriptional regulatory networks play a key role in noise reduction which is conserved from micro-organisms to mammals. FEBS Journal, 2012; http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1742-4658.2012.08571.x
2. J. Qi, T. Michoel, G. Butler: An Integrative Approach to Infer Regulation Programs in a Transcription Regulatory Module Network. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, 2012; http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/245968

Group picture