Alexander Leonard
Alexander Leonard
Member of Corpus Christi College
PhD student in Dr Ahnert's group
Office: 512 Mott Bld
Phone: +44(0)1223 7 46644
Email: asl47 @ cam.ac.uk
TCM Group, Cavendish Laboratory
19 JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge, CB3 0HE UK.
Research
Evolutionary dynamics consist of several components, like mutations, fitness landscapes, and selections. Much of real world evolutionary dynamics are too complex to analyse, whereas we can use a simpler tile assembly model which can still recover many critical dynamics. We can use graph theoretic and combinatoric methods to quantitatively probe these impossible large search spaces and gain insight to the emergence of complexity in evolution.
In Plain English
My research is structured around the self-assembly of tiles into shapes called polyominoes. By looking at how these tiles bind to each other and the structures they produce, we can gain a deeper understanding of how many self-assembly phenomenon like protein quaternary structure by using a very simple but rich model. This can also be extended to explore evolution, and how complexity evolves in genomes.
Featured Publications
- Scaling of the surface vasculature on the human placenta Phys. Rev. E 96 040401(R) 2017