Starting January 1st I will be working for Darrell Whitley in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. I’m very excited about this collaboration as much of my recent work has heavily cited Darrell’s.

The target project is a medical application for finding all local optima in a search space. The idea is that some illnesses are caused by a change in the body’s homeostasis. The theory goes that something goes horribly wrong, and all the processes that keep your hormones and immune system in balance decide that some abnormal state is the new normal. As a result, attempting to treat the symptoms is ineffective the body actively works to return to the abnormal state. My part of this project is going to be:

1. Given a model of the biological system, find the stable states.
2. Also find the stable cylces.
3. Determine what has to change in order to force the system from one stable state/cycle to another.

The goal is to determine how to use medical intervention to convince the body to move back to the true normal state.