“Pyrex vision.” (c) Raekwon
The Ogbunu Lab (“OGPlexus”) is an idea lab, based at Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute, that focuses on how context-dependence influences complex biological and social systems. We often use disease systems as our target problem, and explore them at multiple scales: from genes, to proteins, to cells, and societies.
We are a question-focused group. That is, we are not confined to a single organism, taxa, or disease type (though we mostly focus on microbes and infectious disease).
More information can be found on other sections of this website, and on the Ogbunu Lab site at Yale University.
Primary keywords: evolutionary systems biology, complex systems, disease evolution and ecology, population genetics, epidemiology, evolutionary medicine
Secondary keywords: science & society, data & culture, complex social systems, futurism
Methods: computational biology, experimental evolution, experimental biochemistry & biophysics, mathematical modeling, evolutionary computation, data science, AI
Fundamentally, we offer that the natural world is defined by complex interactions between biological agents and the environment.
We study interactions across scales, from the population level to the molecular level.
Interactions between genes and environments.
Interactions between pathogens, hosts and environments.
Interactions between society and structures.
We aim to establish a bi-directional relationship between theory and disease: Theory allows us to ask important questions about disease, and disease systems provide great models for asking basic questions about how systems (genetic, epidemiological, social) evolve and change.
Importantly, we extend our definition of “disease” to social ills, those phenomena that negatively affect society.