Enoch Yeung

Our lab studies how life enacts mechanisms of control, computation, and learning to engineer robust biological edge computing systems. Bacteria are extremely energy-efficient organisms that survive in the harshest of environments. Not only do they survive, but they solve complex fine-grained and binary classification problems regarding what resources to utilize, adapting to changes in environment and growth conditions at a moment's notice. How do we engineering living computer systems that exhibit the same functional properties? Life finds a way, and in so doing, seems to perform computation in ways that are fundamentally different from our laptops and CPUs. We seek to understand the fundamental laws by which bacteria make decisions and enact computational programs, especially in times of stress or environmental transition. We conduct our research in the Biological Control, Computing, and Learning Laboratory, which is an interdisciplinary group of researchers and students with backgrounds in control theory, synthetic biology, machine learning, dynamical systems, mechanical, electrical and biological engineering.