professor of bioengineering and the Bliss Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering
Education: Ph.D. (physics), State University of New York; M.S. (physics and applied mathematics), B.S. (physics and mathematics), Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Courses teaching: BIOE 310 (Computational Tools for High-Throughput Biological Data)
Research interests: His research interests are in computational systems biology, the evolution of bacterial genomes, phage-bacterial interactions, the dynamics of biomolecular networks, the origins of life, models of complex systems and theoretical statistical physics.
“Sergei Maslov is a world-leading expert in computational systems biology and ideally fits both the bioengineering and big data research areas at Illinois,” said Rashid Bashir, the head of the department of bioengineering. “His research interests synergize very well with the computational genomics and medicine theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the newly developing computational medicine themes at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the microbiome research expertise on the campus, and the systems and synthetic biology efforts in bioengineering and across campus.
“He has also demonstrated exceptional leadership skills by leading or co-leading large center grants. For the past three years, he has been very involved in the Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) project funded at $12 million a year by the Biological and Environmental Research Division of the Department of Energy,” Bashir said.
“He has made pioneering contribution over the past many years in analyzing large datasets in biological systems and networks. His seminal paper in Science in 2002 (cited more than 1,500 times) proposed new generalized edge rewiring algorithms, allowing one to detect and visualize statistically significant topological patterns in large networks. Variants of this model are relevant for cancer biology in understanding the control of apoptosis by Bcl-2 family of proteins and for biomedical applications of gene regulation by microRNA/ceRNA. This work was published in PNAS in 2007.”
Why Illinois? “I like the free spirit at the University of Illinois’ Urbana campus where people really are open to collaborations,” Maslov said. “Compared to other places I have worked at, I see people here as more prone to interdisciplinary research. I feel it is very good that we are starting the brand new medical school, as it is easier to implement new technologies from scratch rather than on top of older ones. My research on complex systems taught me that.”