Professor
Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991
B.S., Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985
Biography
After completing his Ph.D., Professor Brent served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University, where his research focused on computational modeling of how children learn language. He brought these interests to Washington University in 1999, where he developed a second research program in computational biology and eventually phased out computational linguistics. Since 2001, he has focused on computational and molecular methods for improving the accuracy of genome annotation.
Research
The Brent Lab is focused on modeling the way in which the functional states of cells are determined by the control systems encoded in genomes. Professor Brent and his students construct quantitative models of biological control networks that will enable them to understand their functions and the conditions to which they are adapted. Such models will eventually make it possible to predict how modifications to the networks (i.e. engineering) will affect their behavior. Of particular interest are dynamic properties, such as response times and sensitivity to noise. The methods used include probabilistic models such as Dynamic Bayes Nets, continuous physical models based on differential equations and molecular experiments.
Professor Brent has studied the function and evolutionary dynamics of genomes using mathematical and computational sequence analysis. This work has led to significant improvements in genome annotation technology, enhancing the value of genome sequences for the scientific community. In particular, researchers in Professor Brent's lab are developing models that make it possible to accurately predict which regions of a genome are transcribed into pre-messenger RNA, how they are spliced, and which portions of the spliced transcript are translated into protein. One of the primary sources of information they use is the commonalities and differences among the genomes of different organisms. Comparing genome sequences reveals the patterns of evolutionary change since their most recent common ancestor. These patterns contain signatures of the different selective pressures on different components of genes, such as splice sites, coding regions, and translation initiation and termination sites. Ultimately, The Brent Lab would like to gain insight into how the differences between genomic sequences of different species give rise to the observable characteristics of those species.