Gregory Batt
   Research Associate
   Curriculum Vitae

   College of Engineering
   Affiliated with
   Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) and
   Center for BioDynamics (CBD)
   at Boston University
 

I have moved to Verimag: my new web page is here

Contact:  Address: 15 Saint Mary's Street, Room 129
               Boston University,
               Brookline, MA 02446, USA

 Tel:  +1 617 358 0844
 Fax:  +1 617 353 5548

 Email: batt@bu.edu
Research interests: I am mainly interested in developing mathematical methods and computer tools for the analysis of genetic regulatory networks with a focus on using techniques for the algorithmic analysis and formal verification of hybrid systems.

keywords: algorithmic analysis and formal verification of hybrid systems, discrete abstraction, model checking, hybrid models of genetic regulatory networks, model validation for systems biology, system design for synthetic biology
Short bio: I was born in Maubeuge (France) on the 23th of February 1977. After secondary school, I attended a general scientific preparation (biology, earth science, mathematics, physics and chemistry) at Lycée Pierre de Fermat in Toulouse.

Then, I had the opportunity to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, a 4-year research-oriented school. During the first two years, I studied molecular and cellular biology. In the meantime, I joined the European exchange program ERASMUS, and spent a semester at the Uppsala University (Sweden). During the last two years, I studied computer science partly in Lyon and partly at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble.

I started my PhD in computer science in 2002, at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, in the Helix bioinformatics research group, headed by Alain Viari. My PhD work consisted in developing a method for the efficient verification of the dynamical properties of qualitative models of large genetic regulatory networks. This methods combines notions and techniques from hybrid systems theory, qualitative reasoning and model checking, and extends a method for the qualitative simulation of genetic networks previously developed in the research group. This method has been implemented in a new version of the tool Genetic Network Analyzer, and applied to the validation of two models by checking the consistency between predictions and available experimental data. My adviser was Hidde de Jong. More information on my PhD work here.

A more detailed curriculum vitae is available here.
Current research: As a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, I am developing a method for the rational design of synthetic genetic networks using formal analysis of hybrid systems. The goal of this project is to find sets of parameters for which the system is guaranteed to exhibit a specified behavior. This information may help experimentalists to tune synthetic networks. The major challenge is to characterize how the dynamics of the system changes with the parameters.

Recent work:

  • CSH conference on Engineering Principles in Biological Systems, December 2006 [link and abstract]
  • CDC workshop on Hybrid Systems Biology, December 2006 [link]
  • Rovergene 3.0 is out!
  • G. Batt, C. Belta and R. Weiss (2006) Model checking genetic regulatory networks with parameter uncertainty. Accepted HSCC'07. [link]
  • G. Batt, C. Belta and R. Weiss (2006) Model checking liveness properties of genetic regulatory networks. Accepted TACAS'07. [link]
  • G. Batt and C. Belta (2006)  Model Checking Genetic Regulatory Networks with Applications to Synthetic Biology, CISE technical report 2006-IR-0030.

This work is done in collaboration with Calin Belta, Boyan Yordanov (Boston University) and Ron Weiss (Princeton University).
Publications and tools are available here

Presentations are available here

See also my former web page at INRIA here

grégory batt grégory