Peter St. John
Ph.D. Awarded, May 2015
Department of Chemical Engineering
Mitsubishi Chemical Fellowship Recipient
Research
Circadian rhythms – found in nearly all living systems – are the result of complex biochemical pathways which allow organisms to synchronize with their environment. My research seeks to reverse engineer these systems to better understand how life maintains robust, accurate timekeeping with minimal cost. By modifying standard engineering techniques such as sensitivity analysis, global optimization, bifurcations, systems dynamics, I hope to gain insight into the fundamental design philosophy behind circadian oscillators.
Education
B.S., Chemical Engineering, Tufts University, 2010
Contact
Engineering II Room 1508
pstjohn (at) engineering (dot) ucsb (dot) edu
Links
My Google Scholar Profile
My CV
My GitHub Page
Blog
Publications
J.H. Abel, K. Meeker, D. Granados-Fuentes, P.C. St. John, T.J. Wang, B.B. Bales, F.J. Doyle III, E.D. Herzog, L.R. Petzold. “Functional network inference of the suprachiasmatic nucleus.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(16), 2016. doi:10.1073/pnas.1521178113
J.H. Abel, L.A. Widmer, P.C. St. John, J. Stelling, and F.J. Doyle III, ” A Coupled Stochastic Model Explains Differences in Cry Knockout Behavior.” IEEE Life Sciences Letters, Jun 2015. doi:10.1109/LLS.2015.2439498
St John PC, Doyle FJ III. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015 Nov 20;11(11):e1004451. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004451.
P.C. St John, S.R. Taylor, J.H. Abel, F.J. Doyle III, “Amplitude metrics for cellular circadian bioluminescence reporters,” Biophysical Journal, vol. 107, no. 11, pp. 2712-22,Dec 2014. [DOI]
P.C. St John, T. Hirota, S.A. Kay, F.J. Doyle III, “Spatiotemporal separation of PER and CRY posttranslational regulation in the mammalian circadian clock,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 2014. [DOI]
P.C. St John, F.J. Doyle III, “Estimating confidence intervals in predicted responses for oscillatory biological models,” BMC Systems Biology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 71, Jul 2013. [DOI]
T. Hirota, J.W. Lee, P.C St. John, M. Sawa, K. Iwaisako, T. Noguchi, P.Y. Pongsawakul, T. Sontag, D.K. Welsh, D.A. Brenner, F.J. Doyle III, P.G. Schultz, S.A. Kay, “Identification of small molecule activators of cryptochrome,” Science, vol. 337, no. 6098, pp. 1094-1097, July 2012. [DOI]
A.R. Murphy, P. St John, D.L. Kaplan, “Modification of silk fibroin using diazonium coupling chemistry and the effects on hMSC proliferation and differentiation,” Biomaterials, vol. 29, no. 19, pp. 2829-38,Jul 2008. [DOI]