Hi, I am Ruud, and I just completed a computing science PhD in the ICOS group at Newcastle University. I have a background as a physicist; a master and bachelor degree in Physics at the Universities of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit and Universiteit van Amsterdam). However, in my PhD (and previous jobs) I developed myself as a data scientist/software developer.
In my research in the synthetic biology field, I looked at how genetic information's spatial location plays a role in single-cell system dynamics. It is seen that increasing the distance of two parts of a simple pathway can drastically affect its dynamics. When I think of the spatial organisation of the transcribed components, especially small proteins, it seems to me that diffusion on the scale of an E.Coli would cause this organisation to be a short transient process. This would lead to the conclusion that spatial organisation effects are not significant over a protein lifetime. These conflicting observations attracted me to find what is causing this dissonance of this initial model and experiment. I have developed a model consolidating these observations using mathematics and data science, as seen in the publications below.