Alexander van Oudenaarden (MIT)

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name = Alexander van Oudenaarden


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birth_date = birth date and age|1970|03|19
birth_place = Zuidland, The Netherlands
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residence = U.S.A.
citizenship = The Netherlands
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field = Biophysics,Systems biology,Synthetic biology
work_institution = MIT
alma_mater = Delft University of Technology(M.S.,M.S.,Ph.D.)
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Alexander van Oudenaarden (March 19, 1970) is a Dutch biophysicist and systems biologist at MIT. He is a leading researcher in systems biology and synthetic biology, specializing in stochasticity in gene networks and actin dynamics.

Biography

Alexander van Oudenaarden was born March 19th, 1970, in Zuidland, a small town in the Dutch province of South Holland. He studied at the Delft University of Technology, where he obtained a Masters of Science in Materials Science and Engineering ("cum laude") and a Masters of Science in Physics in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Physics ("cum laude") in 1998 in experimental condensed matter physics, under the supervision of Prof. J.E. Mooij. He received the Andries Miedema Award (best Ph.D.-research in the field of condensed matter physics in the Netherlands) for his thesis on "Quantum vortices and quantum interference effects in circuits of small tunnel junctions". In 1998 he moved to Stanford, where he was a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of Biochemistry and of Microbiology & Immunology, working on force generation of polymerizing actin filaments in the Theriot lab and a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Chemistry, working on Micropatterning of supported phospholipid bilayers in the Boxer lab. In 2000 he joined the department of Physics at MIT as an assistant professor, was tenured in 2004 and is now a full professor. In 2001 he received the NSF CAREER award, and was both an Alfred Sloan Research Fellow and the Keck Career Development Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering.He is married with one child.

Work

His lab started with parallel lines of research in actin dynamics [cite journal | quotes= | last=Upadhyaya| first=A | coauthors=J. R. Chabot, A. Andreeva, A. Samadani and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2003 | title=Probing polymerization forces by using actin-propelled lipid vesicles
journal=PNAS USA | volume=100 | pages=4521 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Upadhyaya| first=A | coauthors=A. van Oudenaarden
date=2003 | title=Biomimetic systems for studying actin-based motility
journal=Current Biology | volume=13 | pages=R734 ] and noise in gene networks [cite journal | quotes= | last=Thattai| first=M | coauthors=A. van Oudenaarden
date=2001 | title=Intrinsic noise in gene regulatory networks
journal=PNAS USA | volume=98 | pages=8614 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Ozbudak| first=E | coauthors=M. Thattai, I. Kurtser, A. D. Grossman and A.van Oudenaarden
date=2002 | title=Regulation of noise in the expression of a single gene
journal=Nature Genetics | volume=31 | pages=69 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Thattai| first=M | coauthors=A. van Oudenaarden
date=2002 | title=Attenuation of noise in ultrasensitive signaling cascades
journal=Biophysical Journal | volume=82 | pages=2943 ] , and his current efforts are focused on stochasticity in gene networks [cite journal | quotes= | last=Pedraza | first=J M | coauthors=A. van Oudenaarden
date=2005 | title=Noise propagation in gene networks
journal=Science | volume=307 | pages=1965 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Becskei| first=A | coauthors=B. B. Kaufmann, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2005 | title=Contributions of low molecule number and chromosomal positioning to stochastic geneexpression
journal=Nature Genetics | volume=37 | pages=937 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Acar| first=M | coauthors=A. Becskei, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2005 | title=Enhancement of cellular memory by reducing stochastic transitions
journal=Nature | volume=435 | pages=228 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Chabot| first=J R | coauthors=J. M. Pedraza, P. Luitel, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2007 | title=Stochastic gene expression out-of-steady-state in the cyanobacterial circadian clock
journal=Nature | volume=450 | pages=1249] biological networks as control systems [cite journal | quotes= | last=Thattai| first=M | coauthors=A. Becskei, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2005 | title=A system of counteracting feedback loops regulates Cdc42p actvity during spontaneouscell polarization
journal=Developmental Cell | volume=9 | pages=565 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Tsang| first=J | coauthors= J. Zhu, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2007 | title=MicroRNA-mediated feedback and feedforward loops are recurrent network motifs inmammals
journal=Molecular Cell | volume=26 | pages=753 ] [cite journal | quotes= | last=Mettetal| first=J | coauthors=D. Muzzey, C. Gomez-Uribe, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2008 | title=The frequency dependence of osmo-adaptation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
journal=Science | volume=319 | pages=482 ] , and the evolution of small networks. His lab has been developing tools based on synthetic biology to experimentally probe networks in novel ways, laying down the groundwork for a theoretical understanding of stochasticity in gene networks, and determining the effects of phenotypic variability as a survival strategy [cite journal | quotes= | last=Acar| first=M | coauthors=J. T. Mettetal, and A. van Oudenaarden
date=2008 | title=Stochastic switching as a survival strategy in fluctuating environments
journal=Nature Genetics| volume=40 | pages=471 ] .

References

External links

* [http://web.mit.edu/biophysics/ Alex van Oudenaarden's Lab @ MIT]
* [http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/alexander_van_oudenaarden.html Alex van Oudenaarden's faculty profile @ MIT]

Persondata
NAME=Oudenaarden, Alexander van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Oudenaarden, Alex van
SHORT DESCRIPTION=professor, biophysics
DATE OF BIRTH=March 19, 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH=Zuidland, The Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=