You've reached the home page of Kevin Wood.
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Cluzel Group at Harvard University (Applied Physics / MCB). Please take a look around to learn more about my research.
Also, feel free to drop me an email any time.
A link to my google scholar profile is here.
How do interactions between antibiotics accumulate as the number of drugs increases?
Remarkably, it's not so complicated, despite the enormous complexity of the underlying transcriptional, translational, and metabolic networks within the cell. Our recent work suggests that interactions involving 3 or more drugs are typically negligible, meaning that the effects of large drug combinations are dominated by interactions between pairs of drugs. As a consequence, the effects of drug cocktails can be predicted using only information about the effects of the drugs in pairs. (Learn more here).
How does the interplay of drug toxicity and drug-induced resistance shape bacterial growth?
What happens when bacteria are exposed to a drug known to induce efflux pumps (e.g. aspirin) in combination with an antibiotic? Despite the inherent toxicity of the inducer, it can increase bacterial growth in the presence of an antibiotic. The result is a collection of possible drug interactions depending on the relative strengths of drug toxicity and drug-induced resistance. (Learn more here).
Can random fluctuations lead to spatial or temporal order far from equilibrium?
In some classes of nonequilibrium relaxational models, increasing randomness can lead to spatial pattern formation and temporal oscillations. These results highlight the potentially counterintuitive role of fluctuations in spatially-extended systems (Learn more here or here or here).
How does cooperativity emerge in systems of stochastic oscillators?
Synchronization occurs ubiquitously in nature ( here's one cool example) and represents a prototypical nonequilibrium phase transition because it breaks time-translational symmetry. Remarkably, however, this phase transition shares many quantitative and qualitative features with a class of equilibrium phase transitions. (Learn more here or here or here or here ).