I was born in the Philippines,
in a small town called Pasuquin, Ilocos
Norte. At a young age I left home for the big city to
study at the
Philippine Science High School in
Quezon
City (part of Metro Manila). Although I was more
interested in mathematics and physics than chemistry in high school, for some
reason that I can't
quite remember I majored
in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of the Philippines at
Los Banos (I guess I
wanted to be 'more relevant', or maybe I got tired of city
life and was attracted to the beautiful campus of this university). Ah,
but true love never dies. I accepted an instructor position in the Math &
Physics Department of my alma mater a few weeks after graduation, and found
myself teaching undergraduate Physics for 1.5 years before I
decided to go to graduate school. I moved to Canada and obtained a PhD in Chemistry
(Chemical Physics Program) in 1986 from the
University
of Alberta.
My PhD supervisor was Professor Bruce L. Clarke, the brilliant inventor of Stoichiometric Network Analysis (SNA). The title
of my dissertation is Geometry of the Steady States of Reaction Networks.
I will just briefly mention here some highlights of my training and
experience as a theoretical physical chemist - those that are
most relevant to my present preoccupation in the biomedical
sciences. (You can download a recent copy of my
CV or go to my research page
for more details).
For my first serious scientific work, I applied SNA and nonlinear dynamical systems theory to the analysis of a
complex enzyme reaction network called the peroxidase-oxidase
reaction. Here is a poster that summarizes the most important result of this
work, namely, the theoretical prediction and subsequent experimental validation
of a new behavior of the system; this, more than anything else, convinced me of
the power of good mathematical models. It got me hooked. In the 1980's and
early 90's, I became very fascinated with ideas about emergent behaviors of
complex reaction networks - oscillations, deterministic chaos, spatial patterns
and other life-like dynamics - perhaps foreshadowing my transition into biology.
This move happened in the late 1990's, after I obtained my tenure at Laurentian
University's Chemistry & Biochemistry Department (Sudbury, Ontario, Canada) where I taught mostly undergraduate courses in physical
chemistry, quantum chemistry, and statistical thermodynamics. My
first three publications in hard-core biology journals appeared in 1999; it was
at this time that I felt irrelevant in a chemistry department, and decided
to take positions at Boston University School of Medicine and in the Bioinformatics Institute in the Biopolis complex of Singapore.
Currently, I hold a joint appointment as a Visiting Associate Professor between the
Mathematical
Biosciences Institute and the
Center for Critical Care (Medical Center) at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
The current focus of my research is the development of a microRNA-mRNA
computational platform for discovering biomarkers in breast cancer. Also,
I just finished writing a graduate textbook (with Prof. Avner Friedman) on mathematical models of cellular regulation to be published by Oxford Univ
Press in 2008 (see
ad).
