Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Through interactions with several highly
qualified individuals inside and outside CIGENE, I am currently involved
in a rather broad range of research topics. However, most of the topics
are connected to the overall aim of contributing to the development of a
framework or theoretical foundation being capable of explaining and
predict how observed genetic variation results in observed phenotypic
variation in causal terms. Many will call this activity systems biology.
However, one should keep in mind that genetics (from the Greek genno
(γεννώ) = give birth) is defined as the science of genes, heredity, and
the variation of organisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics). This
shows that a substantial portion of what people consider to be systems
biology research, i.e. the understanding of system characteristics
(phenotypes) from molecular interactions, fits very well within the
disciplinary goals of genetics. Such a theoretical foundation will have a
substantial impact on a broad range of topics within evolutionary
biology, production biology and biomedicine. Needless to say, it will
also have a strong impact on synthetic biology in general.
Guided by the research vision stated above I am currently involved in
understanding basic brain physiological phenomena, the tanning process
in humans, the dynamics underlying generation of malign melanoma, the
ultimate and proximal mechanisms responsible for the observed variation
in filet colour within and between salmon species, the making of
methodology and computational pipelines for handling the next generation
of genotypic or sequence data in connection with detection of causative
genetic variation in biomedicine and production biology, the
additivity/non-additivity structures associated with the expression
phenotypes in yeast, the development of a new high-throughput and
high-dimensional phenotyping methodology for yeast based on FTIR
spectroscopy, use of yeast as a model system for a detailed
understanding of long-standing enigmatic phenomena within genetics,
development of a new approach for how to make use of multivariate
methods on complex models of biological differentiation in order to gain
a much deeper understanding of model behaviour as well as the
relationship between parameters/premises and model behaviour, use of the
mammalian heart model to elucidate basic genetic phenomena, and the
link between statistical descriptors genetic phenomena at the population
level and system dynamics models operating at the individual level.