Welcome to the Raman Lab.

Hello! If you look around our site, you’ll see a lot of different stuff about Biology. But really, we study just one thing. How nature builds complexity. And how we can learn from it.

We believe that the most elegant solutions in science don’t come from reducing systems to their parts, but from understanding how parts come together to create collective, functional wholes. Whether we’re engineering microbial communities to fight drug-resistant pathogens or building machine-learning architectures that mirror biological organization, our north star is the same: uncover the hidden constraints that shape living systems.

Our work sits at the intersection of systems biology, physics, and artificial intelligence. On the biology side, we try to understand evolved systems as we inherit them from nature to elucidate their organizational principles and leverage these findings to build synthetic systems that are natural-like. As an example, our lab recently developed a framework to build synthetic microbiomes through statistical design. On the computational side, we aim to extend principles we have gleaned from biology to engineer learning systems—systems that infer underlying abstractions and constraints of complex domains.

In both realms, we’re guided by a central question: Can we learn the rules of complex systems by observing their behavior, not just their components. In other words, a data-driven approach for understanding our world. To do this, we’ve pioneered new mathematical and engineering frameworks that enable modeling the design space of biological systems, identify governing principles, and distill them into actionable, generative insights.

As you could possibly imagine, embarking on this journey can’t be done by one type of person. Our lab is a diverse group of people, embodying the idea that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. We are a team of biologists, engineers, physicists, physicians, and most of all, dreamers. We routinely collaborate across disciplines, build tools that scale, and strive to make the invisible architecture of biology visible. And designable.

This is just the beginning. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or curious mind, we invite you to explore the work, ideas, and vision that defines the Raman Lab.