Quantitative Studies of Aging Using Statistical Mechanics and Probabilistic Approaches (Paperback)

The goal of understanding aging is not just about fulfilling the age-old quest of immortality, but, rather in trying to answer the question of "what is aging?" we expect to generate insight that can be used to improve the health span of an aging organism. Recently, the biology community has come to play a role into this quest with identifications of gene pathways that can double, even triple the life spans for certain organism such as C .elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. Aging biology finds itself in a post-genomic era. Hopes of bringing methods developed in mathematics, physics or statistics into the biology realm are widespread. The goal and unifying theme of my thesis is to get a better understanding of this new and exiting field (and at the same time ancient subject) of aging as a complex process, using quantitative methods. By combining molecular and biophysical modeling with statistical and mathematical tools, my goal was to provide a multi-scale view of the complex biological process that is aging. The approach I am taking involves consideration of the problem on several levels-from transcriptional regulation of gene expression, modeling of biological pathways and interaction networks, to the development of mathematical and statistical methods; from trying to understand the aging process at a transcriptional level, and analyzing and understanding how stochastic factors might come to play a role in aging in understanding aging as an epigenetic process.