Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Feinberg School of Medicine "Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Multi-scale Approaches for Analyzing *Omic Data"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level Chambers Hall
Details
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Multi-scale Approaches for Analyzing *Omic Data
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun - Assistant Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine
Talk Abstract:
Living processes are governed by complex networks of molecular interactions involving thousands of elements: genes, proteins, enzymes, non-coding RNAs, and other signaling molecules. These systems are finely tuned to produce precise biological effects, robust enough to tolerate intrinsic and extrinsic variability, and flexible enough to adapt to environmental changes, but aberrations in these systems can lead to disease.
Advances in high-throughput "*omic" assays now make it possible to probe these systems in genome-wide detail, providing unprecedented opportunity to investigate disease mechanisms by simultaneously profiling thousands molecular markers per sample. To date, however, most analyses of *omic data consider each marker independently and treat regulatory pathways as a "sum of their parts." By neglecting the network of interactions, such approaches can miss crucial multi--gene effects associated with disease.
This talk will present some recent techniques developed in our group to incorporate pathway information into the analysis of high--dimensional *omic data. By analyzing data at the systems level, our methods enable us to integrate disparate types of *omic data, make inferences about disease mechanisms, and distinguish sets of cumulatively deleterious alterations from those that compensate one-another to preserve the overall function of a pathway. We will show how these analyses can overcome the high variability of *omics data to yield results that are more reproducible across studies, and demonstrate how these methods can be used to identify novel therapeutic and diagnostic targets.
Live Stream:
To join the Meeting: bluejeans.com/8474912527
To join via Browser: bluejeans.com/8474912527/browser
Time
Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details

Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details

Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)