postheadericon Boris N Kholodenko, Ph.D.

My Postgraduate Research Mentor

Dr. Kholodenko is SFI Stokes Professor of Systems Biology and Deputy Director of the Systems Biology Ireland and Conway Institutes, University College Dublin, Ireland. He is also Adjunct Professor at Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, PA, USA). Dr. Kholodenko is the author of more than 180 publications on spatio-temporal dynamics and control analysis of cellular signalling and metabolic networks, and is a founding chairman of the International Consortium on Systems Biology of Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Regulatory Networks. He is widely recognised and respected as an academic leader in the field of Systems Biology and predictive models of cellular functions.

Dr. Kholodenko graduated and received a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia. He was then invited to work in the laboratory of Anatol M. Zhabotinsky, known for his studies of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Afterwards, Kholodenko worked at the Moscow State University, where he made crucial contributions to metabolic control analysis, such as the development of the control analysis of cellular systems involving direct enzyme-enzyme interactions, restricted diffusion and information transfer.

Because of his unique combination of expertise in biochemistry, physical chemistry and mathematics, Kholodenko was invited to the Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, by Hans Westerhoff. In 1997, Kholodenko joined the faculty of Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, PA, USA), where his group along with Dr. Jan Hoek and others developed the first systems biology model of the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor signaling pathway, a novel principle for mechanistic modeling, referred to as a domain-oriented framework, discovered a novel systematic approach to unravel interaction 'maps' in signaling and gene networks from experimental data on steady-state and temporal responses to perturbations, predicted the existence of intracellular gradients of signaling activities that control both the living circuitry and cell communication and showed intricate dynamic behaviours of signalling systems in space and time including oscillations, bistability and travelling waves of phosphorylation signals.

The calculation of the behavior of living cells as the function of nonlinear interactions within and across metabolic, signaling and gene networks can be seen as one of the most important goals of computational cell biology. Current studies in his laboratory are aimed to understand cellular information transfer and cell-fate decisions governed by the spatiotemporal dynamics of signaling and gene networks. The focus of his research group is to integrate the molecular and cell systems levels of analysis to understand and model the behavior of living cells quantitatively. To this end Dr. Kholodenko's group employs a novel interdisciplinary approach combining quantitative biological experiments and advanced mathematical, computer and physical analyses.